Ruby Loo 3f345c4a37 Update comments related to ipmi & old BMCs

The help string for [ipmi]/command_retry_timeout is incorrect. From Sam Betts [1]:
so looking at when this option was introduced ... it was originally introduced
by the ipminative driver which used it as the timeout for waiting until the power
state changed to the requested state. Reading between the lines in the commits
that added this option and documentation, the "setting this too low might break
things" comment originates from bugs in IPMInative. Later on the IPMItool driver
then overloaded this configuration option and changed its meaning by introducing
the min_command_interval config option. It continued to be used for the timeout
for waiting for requested state, but it also now contributed to the the number
of times a IPMItool command would retry retryable errors, which was/is worked out
by dividing retry_timeout by min_command_interval. Now IPMInative no longer in
tree I think we should clean up some of this information.

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/482631/

Change-Id: I8cd8e25a2fb224d477799a2e561573406f9427a9

2017-07-13 10:37:27 -04:00

3.2 KiB

Raw Blame History

Configuring IPMI support

Installing ipmitool command

To enable one of the drivers that use IPMI protocol for power and management actions (for example, ipmi, pxe_ipmitool and agent_ipmitool), the ipmitool command must be present on the service node(s) where ironic-conductor is running. On most distros, it is provided as part of the ipmitool package. Source code is available at http://ipmitool.sourceforge.net/.

Warning

Certain distros, notably Mac OS X and SLES, install openipmi instead of ipmitool by default. This driver is not compatible with openipmi as it relies on error handling options not provided by this tool.

Please refer to the ipmitool driver page for information on how to use IPMItool-based drivers.

Validation and troubleshooting

Check that you can connect to, and authenticate with, the IPMI controller in your bare metal server by running ipmitool:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ip-address> -U <username> -P <password> chassis power status

where <ip-address> is the IP of the IPMI controller you want to access. This is not the bare metal node's main IP. The IPMI controller should have its own unique IP.

If the above command doesn't return the power status of the bare metal server, check that

ipmitool is installed and is available via the $PATH environment variable.
The IPMI controller on your bare metal server is turned on.
The IPMI controller credentials and IP address passed in the command are correct.
The conductor node has a route to the IPMI controller. This can be checked by just pinging the IPMI controller IP from the conductor node.

IPMI configuration

If there are slow or unresponsive BMCs in the environment, the min_command_interval configuration option in the [ipmi] section may need to be raised. The default is fairly conservative, as setting this timeout too low can cause older BMCs to crash and require a hard-reset.

Collecting sensor data

Bare Metal service supports sending IPMI sensor data to Telemetry with certain drivers, such as drivers ending with ipmitool, ilo and irmc. By default, support for sending IPMI sensor data to Telemetry is disabled. If you want to enable it, you should make the following two changes in ironic.conf:

[DEFAULT]
notification_driver = messaging
[conductor]
send_sensor_data = true

If you want to customize the sensor types which will be sent to Telemetry, change the send_sensor_data_types option. For example, the below settings will send information about temperature, fan, voltage from sensors to the Telemetry service:

send_sensor_data_types=Temperature,Fan,Voltage

Supported sensor types are defined by the Telemetry service, currently these are Temperature, Fan, Voltage, Current. Special value All (the default) designates all supported sensor types.

3.2 KiB Raw Blame History