Hi Jay,

Your first point sounds great. It would be very valuable.
I understand your concern. I think we might implement the purchase date information ourselves, so we can then upstream it. We use the name field for the serial number of nodes.
On our end, we were not planning to use it for scheduling.

Looking forward to the PTG.

Best,
Kuba 
From: Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io>
Sent: 03 February 2026 18:46
To: Nathan Harper <nathanh@graphcore.ai>
Cc: Sandmann, Jens <j.sandmann@sap.com>; Jakub Jelinek <jakub.jelinek@cern.ch>; OpenStack Discuss <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [ironic] A first-class physical location API?
 
Thank you all for the input. You all touched on various things I've thought about.

A few things:
1 - This proposal is made with the primary goal being to make nodes searchable by this information. This isn't really possible (in a performant way) with our freeform JSON fields like properties or extra. Right now, CID is working on a spec that would allow bulk node actions -- so think about the intersection of these ideas: "power down every machine in DC 17, row 5, rack 9" or "set all machines in DC 12 room 1 to retirement".
2 - I am concerned that there's too much variety in what people want, so far on this thread we've seen suggestions ranging from location info (as I mentioned) to serial/model numbers, to purchase date information.
3 - I do not expect this information to be immediately useful for scheduling. It's not a part of my current proposal but I'm sure someone else could take the next steps; it's just not a use case I find valuable. I'll also warn folks: the HA model of nova-fronted-ironic is failure isolation; targetting to specific servers takes away any HA in these cases (e.g. if customer X always targets rack Y for deployments; that customer will experience 100% downtime if the nova-compute managing rack Y is down/under update).

I will likely pose this as a discussion item for PTG. Please participate when that time comes (and keep chatting here).

Thanks,
JayF

On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 4:57 AM Nathan Harper <nathanh@graphcore.ai> wrote:
Hi,

We use Netbox for our “proper” DCIM, but giving Ironic knowledge of physical location would be good, especially if that can then be used for placing workloads (eg place all my instances in the same rack/spread my workload over racks).   I guess that goes beyond just Ironic though.

From: Sandmann, Jens <j.sandmann@sap.com>
Date: Friday, 30 January 2026 at 12:10
To: Jakub Jelinek <jakub.jelinek@cern.ch>, Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io>, OpenStack Discuss <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Subject: AW: [ironic] A first-class physical location API?

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Hi,

We are using Netbox for all this information, because we have everything else in there. However, we put the manufacturer, model and serial all in the properties additionally to Netbox. Personally, I'd love to be able to a filter for vendor and model which is a bit cumbersome via properties.
   
Jens

 

 


Von: Jakub Jelinek <jakub.jelinek@cern.ch>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. Januar 2026 10:29
An: Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io>; OpenStack Discuss <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Betreff: Re: [ironic] A first-class physical location API?
 
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Hi Jay, and all,

This would actually be really useful for us.
Especially if populated from DCIM as discussed during the PTG.
Other metadata that would be nice to have would be:
  • Purchase date
  • Installation data

Best,
Kuba
From: Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io>
Sent: 27 January 2026 00:55
To: OpenStack Discuss <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Subject: [ironic] A first-class physical location API?
 
Something I've seen come up in a few discussions over the last couple of
cycles is the need for Ironic to contain more useful information about
the physical world. It's made me wonder if there's an opportunity to add
bigger support for physical characteristics/locations?


I'm thinking metadata like:

- Datacenter the server is in

- Computer room (or other DC subdivision)

- Row

- Rack

- Slot #

- Physical cabling (e.g. what switches you might be connected to and how)


Do other folks see this need? I'm trying to tease out if there's
something here or not, so just curious about use cases and what people
think.


-Jay





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