Open Stack

Hi OOO'ers!

I'd like to get your permission to backport 
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/288417/ to stable/{liberty,mitaka} or 
seek alternative suggestions on how to make life easier for folks 
upgrading for Kilo.

The context of the problem is the following. In the Liberty release we 
(with the whole Ironic world) have switched from the old bash-based 
Ironic deploy ramdisk to IPA. I can't talk enough about benefits that it 
brought us, but today I want to talk about one drawback.

IPA has a different logic for choosing the root device for deployment, 
when several root devices are present. The old ramdisk always tried to 
find a disk by name present in the Ironic disk_devices configuration 
option, defaulting to something like "sda,hda,vda". IPA takes the 
smallest device which is greater than 4 GiB. Obviously, it's not 
guaranteed to be the same.

What it means is that when people upgrade their undercloud from Kilo and 
Liberty and beyond, and rebuild an overcloud node, this node may end up 
with a different root device picked by default. In the absence of 
cleaning, that will probably result in deployment failure (e.g. due to 
duplicated config drive).

A side note: the same was possible and actually happened back in Kilo, 
because device names are not reliable, and can change between reboots.

Now, the Ironic team has always recommended using root device hints for 
several root devices. However, there are valid complaints from users 
that running node-update on every node is not really convenient. And he 
is the patch in question: it adds a new flag to 'baremetal configure 
boot' to bulk-set root device hints based on a strategy or list of 
device names. The root device information is fetched from the 
introspection data. This allows people upgrading from Kilo to just do:

  openstack baremetal configure boot --root-device=sda,hda,vda

to create root device hints matching the previous behavior. I suggest we 
backport this patch to simplify life for people.

I'm also open to alternative suggestions on this.

Thanks for reading this long explanation,
Dmitry