Ironic

Introduction

The ironic hypervisor driver wraps the Bare Metal (ironic) API, enabling Nova to provision baremetal resources using the same user-facing API as for server management.

This is the only driver in nova where one compute service can map to many hosts, meaning a nova-compute service can manage multiple ComputeNodes. An ironic driver managed compute service uses the ironic node uuid for the compute node hypervisor_hostname (nodename) and uuid fields. The relationship of instance:compute node:ironic node is 1:1:1.

Scheduling of bare metal nodes is based on custom resource classes, specified via the resource_class property on a node and a corresponding resource property on a flavor (see the flavor documentation). The RAM and CPU settings on a flavor are ignored, and the disk is only used to determine the root partition size when a partition image is used (see the image documentation).

Configuration

• Configure the Compute service to use the Bare Metal service.

• Create flavors for use with the Bare Metal service.

• Conductors Groups.

Scaling and performance issues

• The update_available_resource periodic task reports all the resources managed by Ironic. Depending the number of nodes, it can take a lot of time. The nova-compute will not perform any other operations when this task is running. You can use conductor groups to help scale, by setting ironic.partition_key.

Known limitations / Missing features

• Migrate

• Resize

• Snapshot

• Pause

• Shelve

• Evacuate