iDRAC driver¶

Overview¶

The integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) is an out-of-band management platform on Dell EMC servers, and is supported directly by the idrac hardware type. This driver utilizes the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Redfish protocol to perform all of it’s functions. In older versions of Ironic, this driver leveraged Web Services for Management (WSMAN) protocol.

iDRAC hardware is also supported by the generic ipmi and redfish hardware types, though with smaller feature sets.

Key features of the Dell iDRAC driver include:

Out-of-band node inspection
Boot device management and firmware management
Power management
RAID controller management and RAID volume configuration
BIOS settings configuration

Ironic Features¶

The idrac hardware type extends the redfish hardware type and supports the following Ironic interfaces:

BIOS Interface: BIOS management
Inspect Interface: Hardware inspection
Management Interface: Boot device and firmware management
Power Interface: Power management
RAID Interface: RAID controller and disk management
Vendor Interface: eject virtual media (Redfish)

Prerequisites¶

The idrac hardware type requires the sushy library and the vendor extensions to be installed on the ironic conductor node(s) if an Ironic node is configured to use an idrac-redfish interface implementation, for example:

sudo pip install 'sushy>=5.6.0'

Enabling¶

The iDRAC driver supports Redfish for the bios, inspect, management, power, and raid interfaces.

The idrac-redfish implementation must be enabled to use Redfish for an interface.

To enable the idrac hardware type, add the following to your /etc/ironic/ironic.conf:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_hardware_types=idrac
enabled_management_interfaces=idrac-redfish
enabled_power_interfaces=redfish

To enable all optional features (BIOS, inspection, RAID, and vendor passthru), use the following configuration:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_hardware_types=idrac
enabled_bios_interfaces=redfish
enabled_firmware_interfaces=redfish
enabled_inspect_interfaces=idrac-redfish
enabled_management_interfaces=idrac-redfish
enabled_power_interfaces=idrac-redfish
enabled_raid_interfaces=idrac-redfish
enabled_vendor_interfaces=idrac-redfish

Below is the list of supported interface implementations in priority order:

Interface	Supported Implementations
`bios`	`idrac-redfish`, `no-bios`
`boot`	`ipxe`, `pxe`, `http-ipxe`, `http`, `redfish-https`, `idrac-redfish-virtual-media`
`console`	`no-console`
`deploy`	`direct`, `ansible`, `ramdisk`
`firmware`	`redfish`, `no-firmware`
`inspect`	`idrac-redfish`, `agent`, `no-inspect`
`management`	`idrac-redfish`
`network`	`flat`, `neutron`, `noop`
`power`	`redfish`, `idrac-redfish`
`raid`	`idrac-redfish`, `no-raid`
`rescue`	`no-rescue`, `agent`
`storage`	`noop`, `cinder`, `external`
`vendor`	`redfish`, `idrac-redfish`, `no-vendor`

Protocol-specific Properties¶

The Redfish protocols require different properties to be specified in the Ironic node’s driver_info field to communicate with the bare metal system’s iDRAC.

The Redfish protocol requires the following properties:

redfish_username: The Redfish user name to use when communicating with the iDRAC. Usually root.
redfish_password: The password for the Redfish user to use when communicating with the iDRAC.
redfish_address: The URL address of the iDRAC. It must include the authority portion of the URL, and can optionally include the scheme. If the scheme is missing, https is assumed.
redfish_system_id: The Redfish ID of the server to be managed. This should always be: /redfish/v1/Systems/System.Embedded.1.

For other Redfish protocol parameters see Redfish driver.

Enrolling¶

The following command enrolls a bare metal node with the idrac hardware type using Redfish for all interfaces:

baremetal node create --driver idrac \
    --driver-info redfish_username=user \
    --driver-info redfish_password=pa$$w0rd \
    --driver-info redfish_address=drac.host \
    --driver-info redfish_system_id=/redfish/v1/Systems/System.Embedded.1 \
    --bios-interface redfish \
    --inspect-interface idrac-redfish \
    --management-interface idrac-redfish \
    --power-interface redfish \
    --raid-interface idrac-redfish \
    --vendor-interface redfish

BIOS Interface¶

The BIOS interface implementations supported by the idrac hardware type allows BIOS to be configured with the standard clean/deploy step approach.

Example¶

A clean step to enable Virtualization and SRIOV in BIOS of an iDRAC BMC would be as follows:

{
  "target":"clean",
  "clean_steps": [
    {
      "interface": "bios",
      "step": "apply_configuration",
      "args": {
        "settings": [
          {
            "name": "ProcVirtualization",
            "value": "Enabled"
          },
          {
            "name": "SriovGlobalEnable",
            "value": "Enabled"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

See the Known Issues for a known issue with factory_reset clean step. For additional details of BIOS configuration, see BIOS Configuration.

Inspect Interface¶

The Dell iDRAC out-of-band inspection process catalogs all the same attributes of the server as the IPMI driver. Unlike IPMI, it does this without requiring the system to be rebooted, or even to be powered on. Inspection is performed using the Redfish protocol directly without affecting the operation of the system being inspected.

The inspection discovers the following properties:

cpu_arch: cpu architecture
local_gb: disk size in gigabytes
memory_mb: memory size in megabytes

Extra capabilities:

boot_mode: UEFI or BIOS boot mode.
pci_gpu_devices: number of GPU devices connected to the bare metal.

It also creates baremetal ports for each NIC port detected in the system. The idrac-redfish inspect interface does not currently set pxe_enabled on the ports. The user should ensure that pxe_enabled is set correctly on the ports following inspection with the idrac-redfish inspect interface.

Management Interface¶

The management interface for idrac-redfish supports:

updating firmware on nodes using a manual cleaning step. See Redfish driver for more information on firmware update support.

RAID Interface¶

See RAID Configuration for more information on Ironic RAID support.

RAID interface of redfish hardware type can be used on iDRAC systems. Compared to redfish RAID interface, using idrac-redfish adds:

Waiting for real-time operations to be available on RAID controllers. When using redfish this is not guaranteed and reboots might be intermittently required to complete,
Converting non-RAID disks to RAID mode if there are any,
Clearing foreign configuration, if any, after deleting virtual disks.

The following properties are supported by the Redfish RAID interface implementation:

Note

When using idrac-redfish for RAID interface iDRAC firmware greater than 4.40.00.00 is required.

Mandatory properties¶

size_gb: Size in gigabytes (integer) for the logical disk. Use MAX as size_gb if this logical disk is supposed to use the rest of the space available.
raid_level: RAID level for the logical disk. Valid values are 0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 5+0 and 6+0.

Note

JBOD and 2 are not supported, and will fail with reason: ‘Cannot calculate spans for RAID level.’

Optional properties¶

is_root_volume: Optional. Specifies whether this disk is a root volume. By default, this is False.
volume_name: Optional. Name of the volume to be created. If this is not specified, it will be auto-generated.

Backing physical disk hints¶

See RAID Configuration for more information on backing disk hints.

These are machine-independent information. The hints are specified for each logical disk to help Ironic find the desired disks for RAID configuration.

disk_type
interface_type
share_physical_disks
number_of_physical_disks

Backing physical disks¶

These are Dell RAID controller-specific values and must match the names provided by the iDRAC.

controller: Mandatory. The name of the controller to use.
physical_disks: Optional. The names of the physical disks to use.

Note

physical_disks is a mandatory parameter if the property size_gb is set to MAX.

Examples¶

Creation of RAID 1+0 logical disk with six disks on one controller:

{ "logical_disks":
  [ { "controller": "RAID.Integrated.1-1",
      "is_root_volume": "True",
      "physical_disks": [
        "Disk.Bay.0:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.1:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.2:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.3:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.4:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.5:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1"],
      "raid_level": "1+0",
      "size_gb": "MAX"}]}

Manual RAID Invocation¶

The following command can be used to delete any existing RAID configuration. It deletes all virtual disks/RAID volumes, unassigns all global and dedicated hot spare physical disks, and clears foreign configuration:

baremetal node clean --clean-steps \
  '[{"interface": "raid", "step": "delete_configuration"}]' ${node_uuid}

The following command shows an example of how to set the target RAID configuration:

baremetal node set --target-raid-config '{ "logical_disks":
  [ { "controller": "RAID.Integrated.1-1",
      "is_root_volume": true,
      "physical_disks": [
        "Disk.Bay.0:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1",
        "Disk.Bay.1:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1"],
      "raid_level": "0",
      "size_gb": "MAX"}]}' ${node_uuid}

The following command can be used to create a RAID configuration:

baremetal node clean --clean-steps \
  '[{"interface": "raid", "step": "create_configuration"}]' <node>

When the physical disk names or controller names are not known, the following Python code example shows how the python-dracclient can be used to fetch the information directly from the Dell bare metal:

import dracclient.client


client = dracclient.client.DRACClient(
    host="192.168.1.1",
    username="root",
    password="calvin")
controllers = client.list_raid_controllers()
print(controllers)

physical_disks = client.list_physical_disks()
print(physical_disks)

Or using sushy with Redfish:

import sushy


client = sushy.Sushy('https://192.168.1.1', username='root', password='calvin', verify=False)
for s in client.get_system_collection().get_members():
  print("System: %(id)s" % {'id': s.identity})
  for c in system1.storage.get_members():
      print("\tController: %(id)s" % {'id': c.identity})
      for d in c.drives:
        print("\t\tDrive: %(id)s" % {'id': d.identity})

Vendor Interface¶

idrac-redfish¶

Through the idrac-redfish vendor passthru interface these methods are available:

Method Name	HTTP Method	Description
`eject_media`	`POST`	Eject a virtual media device. If no device is provided then all attached devices will be ejected. Optional argument: `boot_device` - the boot device to eject, either, `cd`, `dvd`, `usb` or `floppy`.

Known Issues¶

Nodes go into maintenance mode¶

After some period of time, nodes managed by the idrac hardware type may go into maintenance mode in Ironic. This issue can be worked around by changing the Ironic power state poll interval to 70 seconds. See conductor.sync_power_state_interval in /etc/ironic/ironic.conf.

PXE reset with “factory_reset” BIOS clean step¶

When using the UEFI boot mode with non-default PXE interface, the factory reset can cause the PXE interface to be reset to default, which doesn’t allow the server to PXE boot for any further operations. This can cause a clean_failed state on the node or deploy_failed if you attempt to deploy a node after this step. For now, the only solution is for the operator to manually restore the PXE settings of the server for it to PXE boot again, properly. The problem is caused by the fact that with the UEFI boot mode, the idrac uses BIOS settings to manage PXE configuration. This is not the case with the BIOS boot mode where the PXE configuration is handled as a configuration job on the integrated NIC itself, independently of the BIOS settings.

Timeout when powering off¶

Some servers might be slow when soft powering off and time out. The default retry count is 6, resulting in 30 seconds timeout (the default retry interval set by post_deploy_get_power_state_retry_interval is 5 seconds). To resolve this issue, increase the timeout to 90 seconds by setting the retry count to 18 as follows:

[agent]
post_deploy_get_power_state_retries = 18

Firmware update from Swift fails before 6.00.00.00¶

With iDRAC firmware prior to 6.00.00.00 and when using Swift to stage firmware update files in Management interface firmware_update clean step of redfish or idrac hardware type, the cleaning fails with error “An internal error occurred. Unable to complete the specified operation.” in iDRAC job. This is fixed in iDRAC firmware 6.00.00.00. If cannot upgrade, then use HTTP service to stage firmware files for iDRAC.

iDRAC driver

iDRAC driver¶

Overview¶

Ironic Features¶

Prerequisites¶

Enabling¶

Protocol-specific Properties¶

Enrolling¶

BIOS Interface¶

Example¶

Inspect Interface¶

Management Interface¶

RAID Interface¶

Mandatory properties¶

Optional properties¶

Backing physical disk hints¶

Backing physical disks¶

Examples¶

Manual RAID Invocation¶

Vendor Interface¶

idrac-redfish¶

Known Issues¶

Nodes go into maintenance mode¶

PXE reset with “factory_reset” BIOS clean step¶

Timeout when powering off¶

Firmware update from Swift fails before 6.00.00.00¶

ironic 36.0.1.dev8

Page Contents

iDRAC driver

iDRAC driver¶

Overview¶

Ironic Features¶

Prerequisites¶

Enabling¶

Protocol-specific Properties¶

Enrolling¶

BIOS Interface¶

Example¶

Inspect Interface¶

Management Interface¶

RAID Interface¶

Mandatory properties¶

Optional properties¶

Backing physical disk hints¶

Backing physical disks¶

Examples¶

Manual RAID Invocation¶

Vendor Interface¶

idrac-redfish¶

Known Issues¶

Nodes go into maintenance mode¶

PXE reset with “factory_reset” BIOS clean step¶

Timeout when powering off¶

Unable to mount remote share with iDRAC firmware before 4.40.40.00¶

Firmware update from Swift fails before 6.00.00.00¶

ironic 36.0.1.dev8

Page Contents