Prerequisites for the OpenStack bare-metal service¶

Before you deploy an OpenStack environment, you must verify that your environment meets the following network, hardware, and software prerequisites required to succesfully deploy and use the OpenStack Bare Metal service.

Network prerequisites:

• Configure a flat network that you will use for the nodes on which you run ironic. This network will appear as baremetal in the Fuel web UI.

• Prepare the nodes on which you plan to deploy ironic by configuring the following:

  • Prepare the baremetal network.

    In fuel, the baremetal network consists of a virtual subnet range and a solid subnet range. The virtual subnet range is a part of the OpenStack Network service and will be mapped to the Fuel private network. Baremetal servers get their IP addresses from this virtual subnet range in the same manner as virtual instances. The solid subnet range is similar to the Fuel management network and is used for communication between Ironic services (ironic-api, ironic-conductor, ...) and agent that run on baremetal servers. Therefore, configure the baremetal network with care and ensure that the baremetal servers PXE boot interface are plugged into this network. If you need to configure this network interface only on some nodes, such as nodes with ironic and controller roles, use network templates.

  • Access to the IPMI network

    Since Ironic provides out-of-band management through Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the nodes on which you deploy Ironic must have access to the IPMI network with bare-metal servers that you will use for provisioning.

• Verify that the network interfaces of the physical servers that connect to the IPMI network have either static IP addresses or, if you use DHCP, the DNS service is enabled in the IPMI network and the physical servers have stable FQDN host names.

Hardware prerequisites:

Follow the general guidelines for hardware prerequisites described in the System Prerequisites section in the Fuel Installation Guide.

Fuel includes special drivers for Ironic and the default bootstrap images that Fuel uploads to Glance when you create an OpenStack environment. If you plan to use these default configurations, the bootstrap images are based on the image Fuel uses to provision the OpenStack nodes. However, if you plan to use different drivers and bootstrap images, you must verify that the bootstrap image contains drivers that support your hardware.

Software prerequisites:

Each Ironic driver has requirements for the images that you will use to provision instances on physical machines. If you use default Fuel drivers, see Image requirements in the Fuel User Guide.