I everyone, I’m currently working back again with Ironic and it’s amazing! However, during our demo session to our users few questions arise. We’re currently deploying nodes using a private vlan that can’t be reached from outside of the Openstack network fabric (vlan 101 - 192.168.101.0/24) and everything is fine with this provisioning network as our ToR switch all know about it and other Control plan VLANs such as the internal APIs VLAN which allow the IPA Ramdisk to correctly and seamlessly be able to contact the internal IRONIC APIs. (When you declare a port as a trunk allowed all vlan on a aruba switch it seems it automatically analyse the CIDR your host try to reach from your VLAN and route everything to the corresponding VLAN that match the destination IP). So know, I still get few tiny issues: 1°/- When I spawn a nova instance on a ironic host that is set to use flat network (From horizon as a user), why does the nova wizard still ask for a neutron network if it’s not set on the provisioned host by the IPA ramdisk right after the whole disk image copy? Is that some missing development on horizon or did I missed something? 2°/- In a flat network layout deployment using direct deploy scenario for images, am I still supposed to create a ironic provisioning network in neutron?
From my understanding (and actually my tests) we don’t, as any host booting on the provisioning vlan will catch up an IP and initiate the bootp sequence as the dnsmasq is just set to do that and provide the IPA ramdisk, but it’s a bit confusing as many documentation explicitly require for this network to exist on neutron.
3°/- My whole Openstack network setup is using Openvswitch and vxlan tunnels on top of a spine/leaf architecture using aruba CX8360 switches (for both spine and leafs), am I required to use either the networking-generic-switch driver or a vendor neutron driver ? If that’s right, how will this driver be able to instruct the switch to assign the host port the correct openvswitch vlan id and register the correct vxlan to openvswitch from this port? I mean, ok neutron know the vxlan and openvswitch the tunnel vlan id/interface but what is the glue of all that? 4°/- I’ve successfully used openstack cloud oriented CentOS and debian images or snapshot of VMs to provision my hosts, this is an awesome feature, but I’m wondering if there is a way to let those host cloud-init instance to request for neutron metadata endpoint? I was a bit surprised about the ironic networking part as I was expecting the IPA ramdisk to at least be able to set the host os with the appropriate network configuration file for whole disk images that do not use encryption by injecting those information from the neutron api into the host disk while mounted (right after the image dd). All in all I really like the ironic approach of the baremetal provisioning process, and I’m pretty sure that I’m just missing a bit of understanding of the networking part but it’s really the most confusing part of it to me as I feel like if there is a missing link in between neutron and the host HW or the switches. Thanks a lot anyone that will take time to explain me this :-)