Conductor Groups¶

Overview¶

Large scale operators tend to have needs that involve creating well defined and delinated resources. In some cases, these systems may reside close by or in far away locations. Reasoning may be simple or complex, and yet is only known to the deployer and operator of the infrastructure.

A common case is the need for delineated high availability domains where it would be much more efficient to manage a datacenter in Antarctica with a conductor in Antarctica, as opposed to a conductor in New York City.

How it works¶

Starting in ironic 11.1, each node has a conductor_group field which influences how the ironic conductor calculates (and thus allocates) baremetal nodes under ironic’s management. This calculation is performed independently by each operating conductor and as such if a conductor has a [conductor]conductor_group configuration option defined in its ironic.conf configuration file, the conductor will then be limited to only managing nodes with a matching conductor_group string.

How to use¶

A conductor group value may be any case insensitive string up to 255 characters long which matches the ^[a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]*$ regular expression.

1. Set the [conductor]conductor_group option in ironic.conf on one or more, but not all conductors:

   [conductor]
   conductor_group = OperatorDefinedString
   

2. Restart the ironic-conductor service.

3. Set the conductor group on one or more nodes:

   openstack baremetal node set \
       --conductor-group "OperatorDefinedString" <uuid>
   

4. As desired and as needed, remaining conductors can be updated with the first two steps. Please be mindful of the constraints covered earlier in the document related to ability to manage nodes.