Local boot with partition images

Local boot with partition images

The Bare Metal service supports local boot with partition images, meaning that after the deployment the node’s subsequent reboots won’t happen via PXE or Virtual Media. Instead, it will boot from a local boot loader installed on the disk.

Note

Whole disk images, on the contrary, support only local boot, and use it by default.

It’s important to note that in order for this to work the image being deployed with Bare Metal service must contain grub2 installed within it.

Enabling the local boot is different when Bare Metal service is used with Compute service and without it. The following sections will describe both methods.

Enabling local boot with Compute service

To enable local boot we need to set a capability on the bare metal node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities="boot_option:local"

Nodes having boot_option set to local may be requested by adding an extra_spec to the Compute service flavor, for example:

nova flavor-key baremetal set capabilities:boot_option="local"

Note

If the node is configured to use UEFI, Bare Metal service will create an EFI partition on the disk and switch the partition table format to gpt. The EFI partition will be used later by the boot loader (which is installed from the deploy ramdisk).

Enabling local boot without Compute

Since adding capabilities to the node’s properties is only used by the nova scheduler to perform more advanced scheduling of instances, we need a way to enable local boot when Compute is not present. To do that we can simply specify the capability via the instance_info attribute of the node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add instance_info/capabilities='{"boot_option": "local"}'
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