[Openstack-operators] Ironic with top-rack switches management

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Wed Jan 4 17:31:05 UTC 2017


Excerpts from George Shuklin's message of 2016-12-26 00:22:38 +0200:
> Hello everyone.
> 
> 
> Did someone actually made Ironic running with ToR (top rack switches) 
> under neutron in production? Which switch verdor/plugin (and OS version) 
> do you use? Do you have some switch configuration with parts outside of 
> Neutron reach? Is it worth spent efforts on integration, etc?
> 

We had an experimental setup with Ironic and the OVN Neutron driver and
VTEP-capable switches (Juniper, I forget the model #, but Arista also has
models that fully support VTEP). It was able to boot baremetal nodes on
isolated L2's (including an isolated provisioning network). In theory this
would also allow VM<->baremetal L2 networking (and with kuryr, you could
get VM<->baremetal<->container working too). But we never proved this
definitively as we got tripped up on scheduling and hostmanager issues
running with ironic in one host agg and libvirt in another. I believe
these are solved, though I've not seen the documentation to prove it.

> And one more question: Does Ironic support snapshotting of baremetal 
> servers? With some kind of agent/etc?
> 

I think that's asking too much really. The point of baremetal is that
you _don't_ have any special agents between your workload and hardware.
Consider traditional backup strategies.



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