ironic/doc/source/admin/inspection.rst

Hardware Inspection

Overview

Inspection allows Bare Metal service to discover required node properties once required driver_info fields (for example, IPMI credentials) are set by an operator. Inspection will also create the Bare Metal service ports for the discovered ethernet MACs. Operators will have to manually delete the Bare Metal service ports for which physical media is not connected. This is required due to the bug 1405131.

There are two kinds of inspection supported by Bare Metal service:

1. Out-of-band inspection is currently implemented by several hardware types, including ilo, idrac and irmc.
2. In-band inspection by utilizing the ironic-inspector project.

The node should be in the manageable state before inspection is initiated. If it is in the enroll or available state, move it to manageable first:

openstack baremetal node manage <node_UUID>

Then inspection can be initiated using the following command:

openstack baremetal node inspect <node_UUID>

Capabilities discovery

This is an incomplete list of capabilities we want to discover during inspection. The exact support is hardware and hardware type specific though, the most complete list is provided by the iLO ilo-inspection.

secure_boot (true or false)

whether secure boot is supported for the node

boot_mode (bios or uefi)

the boot mode the node is using

cpu_vt (true or false)

whether the CPU virtualization is enabled

cpu_aes (true or false)

whether the AES CPU extensions are enabled

max_raid_level (integer, 0-10)

maximum RAID level supported by the node

pci_gpu_devices (non-negative integer)

number of GPU devices on the node

The operator can specify these capabilities in nova flavor for node to be selected for scheduling:

nova flavor-key my-baremetal-flavor set capabilities:pci_gpu_devices="> 0"

nova flavor-key my-baremetal-flavor set capabilities:secure_boot="true"

Please see a specific hardware type page </admin/drivers> for the exact list of capabilities this hardware type can discover.

In-band inspection

In-band inspection involves booting a ramdisk on the target node and fetching information directly from it. This process is more fragile and time-consuming than the out-of-band inspection, but it is not vendor-specific and works across a wide range of hardware. In-band inspection is using the ironic-inspector project.

It is supported by all hardware types, and used by default, if enabled, by the ipmi hardware type. The inspector inspect interface has to be enabled to use it:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_inspect_interfaces = inspector,no-inspect

If using classic drivers supporting in-band inspection, like pxe_ipmitool, another option has to be set as well:

[inspector]
enabled = True

You must additionally install python-ironic-inspector-client to use this functionality.

If the ironic-inspector service is not registered in the service catalog, set the following option:

[inspector]
endpoint-override = http://inspector.example.com:5050

In order to ensure that ports in Bare Metal service are synchronized with NIC ports on the node, the following settings in the ironic-inspector configuration file must be set:

[processing]
add_ports = all
keep_ports = present