OneView drivers¶

Overview¶

HP OneView [1] is a single integrated platform, packaged as an appliance that implements a software-defined approach to managing physical infrastructure. The appliance supports scenarios such as deploying bare metal servers, for instance. In this context, the HP OneView driver for ironic enables the users of OneView to use ironic as a bare metal provider to their managed physical hardware.

HPE OneView hardware is supported by the oneview hardware type and the following classic drivers:

• iscsi_pxe_oneview
• agent_pxe_oneview

Classic Drivers¶

The iscsi_pxe_oneview and agent_pxe_oneview drivers implement the core interfaces of an ironic Driver [2], and use the hpOneView [3] library to provide communication between ironic and OneView through OneView’s REST API.

To provide a bare metal instance there are four components involved in the process:

• The ironic service
• The ironic-inspector service (if using hardware inspection)

• The ironic driver for OneView, which can be:

  • iscsi_pxe_oneview or
  • agent_pxe_oneview

• The hpOneView library
• The OneView appliance

The role of ironic is to serve as a bare metal provider to OneView’s managed physical hardware and to provide communication with other necessary OpenStack services such as Nova and Glance. When ironic receives a boot request, it works together with the ironic OneView driver to access a machine in OneView, the hpOneView being responsible for the communication with the OneView appliance.

From the Newton release on, OneView drivers enables a new feature called dynamic allocation of nodes [6]. In this model, the driver allocates resources in OneView only at boot time, allowing idle resources in ironic to be used by OneView users, enabling actual resource sharing among ironic and OneView users.

Since OneView can claim nodes in available state at any time, a set of tasks runs periodically to detect nodes in use by OneView. A node in use by OneView is placed in manageable state and has maintenance mode set. Once the node is no longer in use, these tasks will make place them back in available state and clear maintenance mode.

Prerequisites¶

The following requirements apply for both iscsi_pxe_oneview and agent_pxe_oneview drivers:

• OneView appliance is the HP physical infrastructure manager to be integrated with the OneView drivers.

  Minimum version supported is 2.0.

• hpOneView is a python package containing a client to manage the communication between ironic and OneView.

  Install the hpOneView module to enable the communication. Minimum version required is 4.4.0 but it is recommended to install the most up-to-date version:

  $ pip install "hpOneView>=4.4.0"
  

• ironic-inspector if using hardware inspection.

Tested platforms¶

• The OneView appliance used for testing was the OneView 2.0.

• The Enclosure used for testing was the BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure G2.

• The drivers should work on HP Proliant Gen8 and Gen9 Servers supported by OneView 2.0 and above, or any hardware whose network can be managed by OneView’s ServerProfile. It has been tested with the following servers:

  • Proliant BL460c Gen8
  • Proliant BL460c Gen9
  • Proliant BL465c Gen8
  • Proliant DL360 Gen9

  Notice that for the driver to work correctly with Gen8 and Gen9 DL servers in general, the hardware also needs to run version 4.2.3 of iLO, with Redfish enabled.

Hardware Interfaces¶

The oneview hardware type supports the following hardware interfaces:

• boot

  Supports only pxe. It can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_boot_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_boot_interfaces = pxe
  

• console

  Supports only no-console. It can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_console_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_console_interfaces = no-console
  

• deploy

  Supports oneview-direct and oneview-iscsi. The default is oneview-iscsi. They can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_deploy_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_deploy_interfaces = oneview-iscsi,oneview-direct
  

• inspect

  Supports oneview and no-inspect. The default is oneview. They can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_inspect_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_inspect_interfaces = oneview,no-inspect
  

• management

  Supports only oneview. It can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_management_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_management_interfaces = oneview
  

• power

  Supports only oneview. It can be enabled by using the [DEFAULT]enabled_power_interfaces option in ironic.conf as given below:

  [DEFAULT]
  enabled_hardware_types = oneview
  enabled_power_interfaces = oneview
  

The oneview hardware type also supports the standard network and storage interfaces.

To enable the same feature set as provided by all oneview classic drivers, apply the following configuration:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_hardware_types = oneview
enabled_deploy_interfaces = oneview-direct,oneview-iscsi
enabled_inspect_interfaces = oneview
enabled_power_interfaces = oneview
enabled_management_interfaces = oneview

The following commands can be used to enroll a node with the same feature set as one of the classic drivers, but using the oneview hardware type:

• oneview-direct:

  openstack baremetal node create --os-baremetal-api-version=1.31 \
      --driver oneview \
      --deploy-interface oneview-direct
  

• oneview-iscsi:

  openstack baremetal node create --os-baremetal-api-version=1.31 \
     --driver oneview \
     --deploy-interface oneview-iscsi
  

Drivers¶

Hardware inspection¶

OneView drivers for ironic have the ability to do hardware inspection. Hardware inspection is the process of discovering hardware properties like memory size, CPU cores, processor architecture and disk size, of a given hardware. OneView drivers do in-band inspection, that involves booting a ramdisk on the hardware and fetching information directly from it. For that, your cloud controller needs to have the ironic-inspector component [9] running and properly enabled in ironic’s configuration file.

See [10] for more information on how to install and configure ironic-inspector.

Registering a OneView node in ironic¶

Nodes configured to use any of the OneView drivers should have the driver property set to iscsi_pxe_oneview or agent_pxe_oneview. Considering our context, a node is the representation of a Server Hardware in OneView, and should be consistent with all its properties and related components, such as Server Hardware Type, Server Profile Template, Enclosure Group, etc. In this case, to be enrolled, the node must have the following parameters:

• In driver_info
  • server_hardware_uri: URI of the Server Hardware on OneView.
• In properties/capabilities
  • server_hardware_type_uri: URI of the Server Hardware Type of the Server Hardware.
  • server_profile_template_uri: URI of the Server Profile Template used to create the Server Profile of the Server Hardware.
  • enclosure_group_uri (optional): URI of the Enclosure Group of the Server Hardware.

To enroll a node with any of the OneView drivers, do:

$ openstack baremetal node create --driver $DRIVER_NAME

To update the driver_info field of a newly enrolled OneView node, do:

$ openstack baremetal node set $NODE_UUID --driver-info server_hardware_uri=$SH_URI

To update the properties/capabilities namespace of a newly enrolled OneView node, do:

$ openstack baremetal node set $NODE_UUID \
    --property capabilities=server_hardware_type_uri:$SHT_URI,enclosure_group_uri:$EG_URI,server_profile_template_uri=$SPT_URI

In order to deploy, ironic will create and apply, at boot time, a Server Profile based on the Server Profile Template specified on the node to the Server Hardware it represents on OneView. The URI of such Server Profile will be stored in driver_info.applied_server_profile_uri field while the Server is allocated to ironic.

The Server Profile Templates and, therefore, the Server Profiles derived from them MUST comply with the following requirements:

• The option MAC Address in the Advanced section of Server Profile/Server Profile Template should be set to Physical option;
• Their first Connection interface should be:
  • Connected to ironic’s provisioning network and;
  • The Boot option should be set to primary.

Node ports should be created considering the MAC address of the first Interface of the given Server Hardware.

To tell ironic which NIC should be connected to the provisioning network, do:

$ openstack baremetal port create --node $NODE_UUID $MAC_ADDRESS

For more information on the enrollment process of an ironic node, see Enrollment.

For more information on the definitions of Server Hardware, Server Profile, Server Profile Template and other OneView entities, refer to [1] or browse Help in your OneView appliance menu.

3rd Party Tools¶

In order to ease user manual tasks, which are often time-consuming, we provide useful tools that work nicely with the OneView drivers.

References¶