Using Bare Metal service as a standalone service¶

It is possible to use the Bare Metal service without other OpenStack services. You should make the following changes to /etc/ironic/ironic.conf:

1. To disable usage of Identity service tokens:

   [DEFAULT]
   ...
   auth_strategy=noauth
   

2. If you want to disable the Networking service, you should have your network pre-configured to serve DHCP and TFTP for machines that you’re deploying. To disable it, change the following lines:

   [dhcp]
   ...
   dhcp_provider=none
   

   Note

   If you disabled the Networking service and the driver that you use is supported by at most one conductor, PXE boot will still work for your nodes without any manual config editing. This is because you know all the DHCP options that will be used for deployment and can set up your DHCP server appropriately.

   If you have multiple conductors per driver, it would be better to use Networking since it will do all the dynamically changing configurations for you.

3. If you want to disable using a messaging broker between conductor and API processes, switch to JSON RPC instead:

   [DEFAULT]
   rpc_transport = json-rpc
   

If you don’t use Image service, it’s possible to provide images to Bare Metal service via a URL.

There are however some limitations for different hardware interfaces:

• If you’re using Direct deploy, you have to provide the Bare Metal service with the MD5 checksum of your instance image. To compute it, you can use the following command:

  md5sum image.qcow2
  ed82def8730f394fb85aef8a208635f6  image.qcow2
  

• Direct deploy requires the instance image be accessible through a HTTP(s) URL.

Steps to start a deployment are pretty similar to those when using Compute:

1. To use the openstack baremetal CLI, set up these environment variables. Since no authentication strategy is being used, the value can be any string for OS_TOKEN. OS_URL is the URL of the ironic-api process. For example:

   export OS_TOKEN=fake-token
   export OS_URL=http://localhost:6385/
   

2. Create a node in Bare Metal service. At minimum, you must specify the driver name (for example, ipmi). You can also specify all the required driver parameters in one command. This will return the node UUID:

   openstack baremetal node create --driver ipmi \
       --driver-info ipmi_address=ipmi.server.net \
       --driver-info ipmi_username=user \
       --driver-info ipmi_password=pass \
       --driver-info deploy_kernel=file:///images/deploy.vmlinuz \
       --driver-info deploy_ramdisk=http://my.server.net/images/deploy.ramdisk
   
   +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   | Property     | Value                                                                    |
   +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   | uuid         | be94df40-b80a-4f63-b92b-e9368ee8d14c                                     |
   | driver_info  | {u'deploy_ramdisk': u'http://my.server.net/images/deploy.ramdisk',       |
   |              | u'deploy_kernel': u'file:///images/deploy.vmlinuz', u'ipmi_address':     |
   |              | u'ipmi.server.net', u'ipmi_username': u'user', u'ipmi_password':         |
   |              | u'******'}                                                               |
   | extra        | {}                                                                       |
   | driver       | ipmi                                                                     |
   | chassis_uuid |                                                                          |
   | properties   | {}                                                                       |
   +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   

   Note that here deploy_kernel and deploy_ramdisk contain links to images instead of Image service UUIDs.

3. As in case of Compute service, you can also provide capabilities to node properties, but they will be used only by Bare Metal service (for example, boot mode). Although you don’t need to add properties like memory_mb, cpus etc. as Bare Metal service will require UUID of a node you’re going to deploy.

4. Then create a port to inform Bare Metal service of the network interface cards which are part of the node by creating a port with each NIC’s MAC address. In this case, they’re used for naming of PXE configs for a node:

   openstack baremetal port create $MAC_ADDRESS --node $NODE_UUID
   

5. You also need to specify some fields in the node’s instance_info:

   • image_source - URL of the whole disk or root partition image, mandatory. For Direct deploy only HTTP(s) links are accepted, while iSCSI deploy also accepts links to local files (prefixed with file://).

   • root_gb - size of the root partition, required for partition images.

     Note

     Older versions of the Bare Metal service used to require a positive integer for root_gb even for whole-disk images. You may want to set it for compatibility.

   • image_checksum - MD5 checksum of the image specified by image_source, only required for Direct deploy.

     Starting with the Stein release of ironic-python-agent can also be a URL to a checksums file, e.g. one generated with:

     cd /path/to/http/root
     md5sum *.img > checksums
     

   • kernel, ramdisk - HTTP(s) or file URLs of the kernel and initramfs of the target OS, only required for partition images.

   For example:

   openstack baremetal node set $NODE_UUID \
       --instance-info image_source=$IMG \
       --instance-info image_checksum=$MD5HASH \
       --instance-info kernel=$KERNEL \
       --instance-info ramdisk=$RAMDISK \
       --instance-info root_gb=10
   

6. Validate that all parameters are correct:

   openstack baremetal node validate $NODE_UUID
   
   +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
   | Interface  | Result | Reason                                                         |
   +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
   | boot       | True   |                                                                |
   | console    | False  | Missing 'ipmi_terminal_port' parameter in node's driver_info.  |
   | deploy     | True   |                                                                |
   | inspect    | True   |                                                                |
   | management | True   |                                                                |
   | network    | True   |                                                                |
   | power      | True   |                                                                |
   | raid       | True   |                                                                |
   | storage    | True   |                                                                |
   +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
   

7. Now you can start the deployment, run:

   openstack baremetal node deploy $NODE_UUID
   

For iLO drivers, fields that should be provided are:

• ilo_deploy_iso under driver_info;
• ilo_boot_iso, image_source, root_gb under instance_info.