Looking at the specs, it seems it's mostly talking about changing VMs resources without rebooting. However that's not the actual intent of the Ironic use case I explained in the email. Yes, it requires a reboot to reflect the BIOS changes. This reboot can be either be done by Nova IronicDriver or Ironic deploy step can also do it. So I am not sure if the spec actually satisfies the use case. I hope to get more response from the team to get more clarity.
Waitwait. The VM needs to be rebooted for the BIOS change to take effect? So (non-live) resize would actually satisfy your use case just fine. But the problem is that the ironic driver doesn't support resize at all? Without digging too hard, that seems like it would be a fairly straightforward thing to add. It would be limited to only "same host" and initially you could only change this one attribute (anything else would have to fail). Nova people, thoughts? efried .