[openstack-dev] [ironic] using ironic as a replacement for existing datacenter baremetal provisioning

Sam Betts (sambetts) sambetts at cisco.com
Wed Jun 8 10:39:20 UTC 2016



On 07/06/2016 23:59, "Kris G. Lindgren" <klindgren at godaddy.com<mailto:klindgren at godaddy.com>> wrote:

Replying to a digest so sorry for the copy and pastes....


>> There's also been discussion of ways we could do ad-hoc changes in RAID level,
>> based on flavor metadata, during the provisioning process (rather than ahead of
>> time) but no code has been done for this yet, AFAIK.
>
> I'm still pretty interested in it, because I agree with anything said
> above about building RAID ahead-of-time not being convenient. I don't
> quite understand how such a feature would look like, we might add it as
> a topic for midcycle.

This sounds like an interesting/acceptable way to handle this problem to me.  Update the node to set the desired raid state from the flavor.

>> - Inspection is geared towards using a different network and dnsmasq

>> infrastructure than what is in use for ironic/neutron.  Which also means that in
>> order to not conflict with dhcp requests for servers in ironic I need to use
>> different networks.  Which also means I now need to handle swinging server ports
>> between different networks.
>> Inspector is designed to respond only to requests for nodes in the inspection
> phase, so that it *doesn't* conflict with provisioning of nodes by Ironic. I've
> been using the same network for inspection and provisioning without issue -- so
> I'm not sure what problem you're encountering here.

So I was mainly thinking about the use case of using inspector to onboard unknown hosts into ironic (though I see didn't mention that).  So in a datacenter we are always on boarding servers.  Right now we boot a linux agent that "inventories" the box and adds it to our management system as a node to be able to be consumed by a build request.  My understanding is that inspector supports this as of Mitaka.  However, the install guide for inspection states that you need to install its own dnsmasq instance for inspection.  To me this implies that this is suppose to be a separate network.  As if I have 2 dhcp servers running on the same L2 network I am going to get races between the 2 dhcp servers for normal provisioning activities.  Especially if one dhcp server is configured to respond to everything (so that it can onboard unknown hardware) and the other only to specific hosts(ironic/neutron).  The only way that wouldn't be an issue is if both inspector and ironic/neutron are using the same dhcp servers.  Or am I missing something?

Ironic inspector handles this by managing Iptables as a firewall service to white/black list nodes, only allowing nodes that should be talking to the Inspector's dnsmasq instance to be served by it. This avoids any DHCP races between Ironic and Inspector.


___________________________________________________________________
Kris Lindgren
Senior Linux Systems Engineer
GoDaddy
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