Ironic

Managing and provisioning bare metal machines

Imre Farkas, Lucas Gomes and Matt Wagner

Agenda

• Overview
• Current
• Future

Overview

• provides an API for managing and provisioning of physical machines
• replaces the Nova baremetal driver

Baremetal

• hardware is not virtualized
• the tenant has full access to the hardware
• hypervisor API gluing together multiple pluggable drivers
• pluggable drivers to allow vendor-specific functionality to be added

Why is baremetal important?

• HPC
• devices which can't be virtualized
• database hosting
• deploying a cloud infrastructure

Why ALL other tools (MAAS, Crowbar, Foreman) SUCK?

Nova Baremetal vs Ironic split

• separate database
• requires a considerable amount of information which is unrelated to virtualized deployment
• tasks on hardware which do not apply to virtual machines
• interactions with other projects (eg. Neutron) which do not apply to virtual environments

Current

Ironic Components

• Ironic API: The component which operators and other services may interact with to manage the bare metal servers.
• Ironic Conductor: The component which does the bulk of the work. Functionality is exposed via the API service. The Conductor and API services communicate via RPC.
• Database: A Database for registering resources and storing the state of the Conductor and its drivers.
• Deploy Ramdisk: A Deployment Ramdisk which does the work over the hardware which is not available remotely to the Conductor.

Ironic Flow

Driver Interfaces

• Core
  • Power ({set, get}_power_state(); ...)
  • Provision (deploy(); tear_down(); prepare(); ...)
• Standard
  • Console ({start, stop, get}_console(); ...)
  • Rescue (rescue(); unresue(); ...)
• Vendor (validate(); vendor_passhtru();)

Example of a Driver

class PXEAndIPMIToolDriver(base.BaseDriver):

    def __init__(self):
        self.power = ipmitool.IPMIPower()
        self.deploy = pxe.PXEDeploy()

        pxe_vendor = pxe.VendorPassthru()
        ipmi_vendor = ipmitool.VendorPassthru()
        mapping = {'pass_deploy_info': pxe_vendor,
                   'set_boot_device': ipmi_vendor}
        self.vendor = utils.MixinVendorInterface(mapping)

class IPMIPower(base.PowerInterface):

    def validate(self, task, node):
        ...

    def get_power_state(self, task, node):
        ...

    def set_power_state(self, task, node, pstate):
        ...

    def reboot(self, task, node):
        ...

The Vendor Interface

• set_boot_device() (is probably going to be promoted)
• update_firmware() ???
• boot_from_network_volume() ???
• ???

PXE and IPMI Driver Deploy Flow

Fault Tolerance

(Not complete there yet...)

Sunnyvale Overview

• Mid-cycle meetup week of March 3rd in Sunnyvale, CA.
• TripleO and Ironic upstream meeting.
• HP, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Rackspace, Mirantis sent developers.

So what happened?

• Feature freeze (Feb. 3); -2'd several patches
  • Serial console support
  • Nova Baremetal migration
  • Windows image deploy
  • iLo power and virtual media support
• (Continued)

So what else happened?

• Ironic driver for Nova temporarily moved in-tree
• Continuous Integration work done
• User documentation focus
• Discussion re: managing network/storage hardware
• Ramdisk agent discussions for robust provisioning

Future

Questions / Topics to discuss