Story
As an operator I would like to build a small cloud with both virtual and bare
metal instances or add bare metal provisioning to my existing small or medium
scale single-site OpenStack cloud. The expected number of bare metal machines
is less than 100, and the rate of provisioning and unprovisioning is expected
to be low. All users of my cloud are trusted by me to not conduct malicious
actions towards each other or the cloud infrastructure itself.
As a user I would like to occasionally provision bare metal instances through
the Compute API by selecting an appropriate Compute flavor. I would like
to be able to boot them from images provided by the Image service or from
volumes provided by the Volume service.
Networking
The networking architecture will highly depend on the exact operating
requirements. This guide expects the following existing networks:
control plane, storage and public. Additionally, two more networks
will be needed specifically for bare metal provisioning: bare metal and
management.
Control plane network
The control plane network is the network where OpenStack control plane
services provide their public API.
The Bare Metal API will be served to the operators and to the Compute service
through this network.
Public network
The public network is used in a typical OpenStack deployment to create
floating IPs for outside access to instances. Its role is the same for a bare
metal deployment.
Note
Since, as explained below, bare metal nodes will be put on a flat provider
network, it is also possible to organize direct access to them, without
using floating IPs and bypassing the Networking service completely.
Management network
Management network is an independent network on which BMCs of the bare
metal nodes are located.
The ironic-conductor
process needs access to this network. The tenants
of the bare metal nodes must not have access to it.
Storage
If your hardware and its bare metal driver support
booting from remote volumes, please check the driver documentation for
information on how to enable it. It may include routing management and/or
bare metal networks to the storage network.
In case of the standard PXE boot, booting from remote volumes is done
via iPXE. In that case, the Volume storage backend must support iSCSI
protocol, and the bare metal network has to have a route to the storage
network. See Boot From Volume for more details.