Configuring the Bare Metal (Ironic) Service (optional)

This section describes the general concepts involved in an Ironic deployment. It will be necessary for a deployer to make decisions about how to apply the general concepts in their own environment to meet a specific set of requirements. It should be understood that the Ironic service is highly configurable and pluggable so there is no single reference design specified by the Ironic project team.

Note

This feature is experimental at this time and has not been fully production tested.

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal (as opposed to virtual) machines by leveraging common technologies such as PXE boot and IPMI to cover a wide range of hardware, while supporting pluggable drivers to allow vendor-specific functionality to be added.

OpenStack’s Ironic project makes physical servers as easy to provision as virtual machines in a cloud.

OpenStack-Ansible Deployment

The use of Ironic within an OpenStack deployment leverages Nova to deploy baremetal instances when an openstack server create command is issued using a baremetal flavor. So, in addition to Ironic API services, a Nova compute service using an Ironic compute driver (as opposed to libvirt) must be configured. The playbooks can automatically deploy this service when the inventory is configured accordingly.

To deploy Ironic, populate the respective groups within openstack_user_config.yml:

ironic-infra_hosts: *infrastructure_hosts
ironic-compute_hosts: *infrastructure_hosts

With the inventory updated, Ironic API and conductor services will be deployed on the infra/controller nodes, along with a nova-compute service configured for use with Ironic.

OpenStack-Ansible is configured to support PXE-based deployments by default. To enable the use of iPXE, which uses HTTP instead of TFTP for the full deployment, add the following override:

ironic_ipxe_enabled: yes

Note

With iPXE enabled, PXE is used to bootstrap into the iPXE loader. Deployment times are considerably faster with iPXE vs PXE, and its configuration is highly recommended. When iPXE is enabled, a web server is deployed on the conductor node(s) to host images and files.

Some drivers of the Baremetal service (in particular, any drivers using Direct deploy or Ansible deploy interfaces, and some virtual media drivers) require target user images to be available over clean HTTP(S) URL with NO authentication involved (neither username/password-based, nor token-based).

The default deploy method relies on Swift to provide this functionality. If Swift is not available in your environment, then the following override can provide similar functionality by using the web server deployed the conductor node(s) (see ironic_ipxe_enabled):

ironic_enable_web_server_for_images: yes

The Ironic ipmi hardware driver is enabled by default. Vendor-specific drivers, including iLO and DRAC, are available for use with supported hardware. OpenStack-Ansible provides a set of drivers with pre-configured hardware, boot, deploy, inspect, management, and power characteristics, including:

  • agent_ilo

  • agent_ipmitool

  • agent_ipmitool_socat

  • agent_irmc

  • pxe_drac

  • pxe_drac_inspector

  • pxe_ilo

  • pxe_ipmitool

  • pxe_ipmitool_socat

  • pxe_irmc

  • pxe_snmp

Note

The characteristics of these drivers can be seen in further details by reviewing the ironic_driver_types variable in the Ironic role.

To enable iLO and DRAC drivers, along with IPMI, set the following override:

ironic_drivers_enabled:
  - agent_ipmitool
  - pxe_ipmitool
  - agent_ilo
  - pxe_ilo
  - pxe_drac

Setup Neutron Networks for Use With Ironic

Ironic supports two main network interfaces: flat and neutron:

  • The flat interface places all provisioned nodes and nodes being
    deployed into a single layer 2 network.
  • The neutron interface provides tenant-defined networking
    (aka multi-tenancy) by integrating with Neutron, while also separating
    tenant networks from the provisioning and cleaning provider networks.

With the flat network interface, inspection, cleaning, and provisioning functions will be performed on the same flat provider network. All baremetal nodes will share the same VLAN and network/subnet once deployed, which may present security challenges to tenants and to the control plane.

With the neutron network interface, inspection, cleaning, provisioning, and tenant networks can use distict VLANs. However, an ML2 plugin such as networking-generic-switch must be used to configure the respective switchports when switching between functions.

https://docs.openstack.org/openstack-ansible-os_neutron/latest/app-genericswitch.html

Note

Both the flat and neutron network interfaces require a cleaning network to be defined in ironic.conf. For flat deployments, the cleaning network will be the same as the deployment network.

Create a network and subnet to be used by the baremetal instance for cleaning, provisioning, and post-deployment use:

openstack network create \
--provider-network-type flat \
--provider-physical-network physnet1 \
myBaremetalNetwork

openstack subnet create \
--network myBaremetalNetwork \
--subnet-range 172.17.100.0/24 \
myBaremetalNetworkSubnet

Set an override to define the cleaning network name:

ironic_neutron_cleaning_network_name: "myBaremetalNetwork"

Note

Ironic multi-tenancy is an advanced topic that requires the use of a compatible ML2 driver such as networking-generic-switch.

Important

Provisioning activities on baremetal instances require network access to the Ironic conductor (web) service and other OpenStack APIs. You must ensure routing exists between respective networks for deployments to succeed.

Building Ironic Images

Bare Metal provisioning requires two sets of images: the deploy images and the user images. The deploy images consist of a kernel and ramdisk image that are used by Ironic to prepare the baremetal server for actual OS deployment, whereas the user images are installed on the baremetal server to be used by the end user.

For more information on building and uploading disk images for use with Ironic, refer to the following documentation:

https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/user/creating-images.html https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/install/configure-glance-images.html

There are two types of user images:

  • Partition Images

  • Whole Disk Images

For your convenience, the following steps have been provided to demonstrate creating partition-based images.

Note

Images created using diskimage-builder must be built outside of an LXC container. For this process, use one of the physical hosts within the environment or a virtual machine.

  1. Install the necessary pre-requisites:

    apt install qemu uuid-runtime curl

  2. Install the disk-imagebuilder package:

    pip install diskimage-builder

    Important

    Only use the --isolated flag if you are building on a node deployed by OpenStack-Ansible, otherwise pip will not resolve the external package.

  3. Create Ubuntu Focal kernel, ramdisk, and user images:

    export IMAGE_NAME=my-image
export DIB_RELEASE=focal
export DIB_CLOUD_INIT_DATASOURCES="Ec2, ConfigDrive, OpenStack"
disk-image-create ubuntu baremetal dhcp-all-interfaces grub2 -o ${IMAGE_NAME}

  4. Upload the created user images into the Image (Glance) Service:

    # Kernel image:
openstack image create my-image.kernel \
--public \
--disk-format aki \
--container-format aki \
--file my-image.vmlinuz

# Ramdisk image
openstack image create my-image.initrd \
--public \
--disk-format ari \
--container-format ari \
--file my-image.initrd

# User image
openstack image create my-image \
--public \
--disk-format qcow2 \
--container-format bare \
--property kernel_id=<kernel image uuid> \
--property ramdisk_id=<ramdisk image uuid> \
--file my-image.qcow2

Note

When a baremetal instance is provisioned using a partition-based image, the kernel and ramdisk images will be used for PXE when the local boot capability is not available.

Creating an Ironic Flavor

The use of flavors are necessary when creating instances using Nova, and baremetal flavors should be used when targeting baremetal nodes for instances. The properties of the flavor, along with the defined resource class, are useful to the scheduler when scheduling against libvirt or ironic compute services.

As an example, imagine an Ironic deployment has the following nodes:

- node-1:
  resource_class: ironic-gold
  properties:
    cpus: 32
    memory_mb: 32768
    capabilities:
      boot_mode: uefi,bios
- node-2:
  resource_class: ironic-silver
  properties:
    cpus: 16
    memory_mb: 16384

The operator might define the flavors as such:

- baremetal-gold
  resources:
    ironic-gold: 1
  extra_specs:
    capabilities: boot_mode:bios
- baremetal-gold-uefi
  resources:
    ironic-gold: 1
  extra_specs:
    capabilities: boot_mode:uefi
- baremetal-silver
  resources:
    ironic-silver: 1

A user booting an instance with either the baremetal-gold or baremetal-gold-uefi flavor would land on node-1, because capabilities can still be passed down to ironic, and the resource_class on the node matche what is required by flavor. The baremetal-silver flavor would match node-2.

Note

A flavor can request exactly one instance of a bare metal resource class.

When creating a baremetal flavor, it’s useful to add the RAM and CPU properties as a convenience to users, although they are not used for scheduling. In addition, the DISK property is also not used for scheduling, but is still used to determine the root partition size.

openstack flavor create \
--ram 32768 \
--vcpu 32 \
--disk 120 \
baremetal-gold

After creation, associate each flavor with one custom resource class. The name of a custom resource class that corresponds to a node’s resource class (in the Bare Metal service) is:

  • the bare metal node’s resource class all upper-cased

  • prefixed with CUSTOM_

  • all punctuation replaced with an underscore

openstack flavor set \
--property resources:CUSTOM_IRONIC_GOLD=1 \
baremetal-gold

Note

Ensure the resource class defined in the flavor matches that of the baremetal node, otherwise, the scheduler will not find eligible hosts. In the example provided, the resource class is ironic-gold.

Another set of flavor properties must be used to disable scheduling based on standard properties for a bare metal flavor:

openstack flavor set --property resources:VCPU=0 baremetal-gold
openstack flavor set --property resources:MEMORY_MB=0 baremetal-gold
openstack flavor set --property resources:DISK_GB=0 baremetal-gold

Lastly, a boot_option capability can be set to speed up booting after the deployment:

openstack flavor set --property capabilities:'boot_option=local' baremetal-gold

Note

Specifying the local boot option allows the deployed baremetal instance to boot directly to disk instead of network.

Enrolling Ironic Nodes

Enrolling baremetal nodes makes then available to the Ironic service. The properties of a given node will allow Ironic to determine how an image should be deployed on the node, including using IPMI or vendor-specific out-of-band interfaces. Some properties are optional, and may rely on defaults set by the operator or within OpenStack-Ansible. Others are required, and may be noted as such.

Some things should be known about the baremetal node prior to enrollment, including:

  • Node Name

  • Driver

  • Deploy Interface (based on driver)

  • Provisioning Interface (MAC Address)

  • IPMI or OOB Credentials

  • OOB Management IP

  • Deploy Kernel Image UUID (from Glance)

  • Deploy Ramdisk Image UUID (from Glance)

  • Boot Mode (bios or uefi)

  • Network Interface (flat or neutron)

Note

Kernel and ramdisk images may be provided by the diskimage-builder process, or may be downloaded from opendev.org:

https://tarballs.opendev.org/openstack/ironic-python-agent/dib/ https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/install/deploy-ramdisk.html

Important

The deploy kernel and ramdisk should be updated on a regular basis to match the OpenStack release of the underlying infrastructure. The Ironic Python Agent that runs on the ramdisk interfaces with Ironic APIs, and should be kept in sync.

To enroll a node, use the openstack baremetal node create command. The example below demonstrates the creation of a baremetal node with the following characteristics:

node_name=baremetal01
node_mac="f0:92:1c:0c:1f:88"    # MAC address of PXE interface (em1 as example)
deploy_aki=ironic-deploy-aki    # Kernel image
deploy_ari=ironic-deploy-ari    # Ramdisk image
resource=ironic-gold            # Ironic resource class (matches flavor as CUSTOM_IRONIC_GOLD)
phys_arch=x86_64
phys_cpus=32
phys_ram=32768
phys_disk=270
ipmi_username=root
ipmi_password=calvin
ipmi_address=172.19.0.22
boot_mode=bios
network_interface=flat

Important

The Ironic conductor service must be able to communicate with the OOB IP address to perform provisioning functions.

openstack baremetal node create \
  --driver ipmi \
  --deploy-interface direct \
  --driver-info ipmi_username=$ipmi_username \
  --driver-info ipmi_password=$ipmi_password \
  --driver-info ipmi_address=$ipmi_address \
  --driver-info deploy_kernel=`openstack image show $deploy_aki -c id |awk '/id / {print $4}'` \
  --driver-info deploy_ramdisk=`openstack image show $deploy_ari -c id |awk '/id / {print $4}'` \
  --property cpus=$phys_cpus \
  --property memory_mb=$phys_ram \
  --property local_gb=$phys_disk \
  --property cpu_arch=$phys_arch \
  --property capabilities='boot_option:local,disk_label:gpt' \
  --resource-class $resource \
  --network-interface $network_interface \
  --name $node_name

The node will first appear in an enroll state. To make it available for provisioning, set the state to manage, then available:

openstack baremetal node manage baremetal01
openstack baremetal node provide baremetal01
openstack baremetal node list --fit

+--------------------------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| UUID                                 | Name        | Instance UUID | Power State | Provisioning State | Maintenance |
+--------------------------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| c362890d-5d7a-4dc3-ad29-7dac0bf49344 | baremetal01 | None          | power off   | available          | False       |
+--------------------------------------+-------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+

Next, create a baremetal port using the openstack baremetal port create command:

node_name=baremetal01
node_mac="f0:92:1c:0c:1f:88"
openstack baremetal port create $node_mac \
--node `openstack baremetal node show $node_name -c uuid |awk -F "|" '/ uuid  / {print $3}'`

+-----------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Field                 | Value                                |
+-----------------------+--------------------------------------+
| address               | f0:92:1c:0c:1f:88                    |
| created_at            | 2021-12-17T20:36:19+00:00            |
| extra                 | {}                                   |
| internal_info         | {}                                   |
| is_smartnic           | False                                |
| local_link_connection | {}                                   |
| node_uuid             | c362890d-5d7a-4dc3-ad29-7dac0bf49344 |
| physical_network      | None                                 |
| portgroup_uuid        | None                                 |
| pxe_enabled           | True                                 |
| updated_at            | None                                 |
| uuid                  | 44e5d872-ffa5-45f5-a5aa-7147c523e593 |
+-----------------------+--------------------------------------+

Note

The baremetal port is used to setup Neutron to provide DHCP services during provisioning. When the neutron network interface is used, the respective switchport can be managed by OpenStack.

Deploy a Baremetal Node Using Ironic

Baremetal instances can be deployed using the openstack server create command and a baremetal flavor. Unless the image has been created with support for passwords, an SSH key must be provided. The baremetal instance relies on Neutron DHCP and metadata services, just like a virtual instance.

openstack server create \
--flavor baremetal-gold \
--image focal-server-cloudimg-amd64 \
--key-name myKey \
--network myBaremetalNetwork \
myBaremetalInstance

Important

If you do not have an ssh key readily available, set one up with ssh-keygen and/or create one with openstack keypair create. Otherwise, you will not be able to connect to the deployed instance.