In the work that we're doing with the Mass Open Cloud [1], we're looking at using Ironic (and the multi-tenant support we contributed) to manage access to a shared pool of hardware while still permitting people to use their own provisioning tools.
We don't want to expose the hardware BMC directly to consumers; we want Ironic to act as the access control mechanism for all activities involving the hardware.
The missing part of this scenario is that at the moment this would require provisioning tools to know how to talk to the Ironic API if they want to perform BMC actions on the host, such as controlling power.
While talking with Mainn the other day, it occurred to me that maybe we could teach virtualbmc [2] how to talk to Ironic, so that we could provide a virtual IPMI interface to provisioning tools. There are some obvious questions here around credentials (I think we'd probably generate them randomly when assigning control of a piece of hardware to someone, but that's more of an implementation detail).
I wanted to sanity check this idea: does this seem reasonable? Are there alternatives you would suggest?
Thanks!
[1] https://github.com/CCI-MOC/esi [2] https://github.com/openstack/virtualbmc