Open Stack

On 12/20/2018 07:12 AM, Curtis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been looking through the docs I can find related to the edge 
> working group, and I'm wondering if there has been any 
> discussion/documentation of a Zero Touch Provisioning use case. I can't 
> seem to find anything, but I may not be looking in the right place. Just 
> wanted to double check and see what the current state is, if any.

I take it that by "zero touch *provisioning*" (emphasis added to 
differentiate from zero *configuration* networking, you are referring to 
the ability for a new server to be rack-and-stacked in a site, powered 
on, and immediately register itself with either a local inventory 
management system or a remote one?

In either case, the issue I foresee is that the firmware (or initial 
boot/ramdisk that comes from the factory or supply chain team) will need 
to have some program installed in it that sends out a request looking 
for some known/assumed inventory management service [1]. The thing that 
*responds* to such a request would, of course, need to be already 
installed and available either on a switch or a pre-installed machine 
pingable on the out-of-band network and already configured by the team 
that handles hardware inventory.

I can see some vendors working on their own custom low-touch 
provisioning software -- and this software would likely end up depending 
on their own proprietary (or subscription-based) server software ala Red 
Hat's Satellite software [2]). But getting all the vendors to come 
together on a unified low-touch provisioning system? Chances are pretty 
slim, IMHO.

Still, it's an interesting problem domain and I'd be interested in 
sharing thoughts and discussing it with others. Here at 
"Yahoo!/Oath/Verizon Media Group/Whatever we'll be called next month" we 
have custom software (and a bit of custom hardware!) that handles base 
hardware provisioning and I'm definitely interested in seeing if other 
shops that handle hundreds of thousands of baremetal machines are 
looking to collaborate in this area ("edge" or otherwise!).

Best,
-jay

[1] this could be done via some custom DHCPDISCOVER/DHCPREQUEST bits I 
suppose -- which would require a DHCP client in the firmware/bootdisk -- 
but more likely would depend on the IPMI/BMC system in use for the 
hardware. As soon as IPMI/BMC comes into play, the extreme differences 
in OEM vendor support will rule out a generic workable solution here as 
many in the Ironic community will likely attest to [3]. If you can rely 
on a homogeneous set of hardware at edge sites, you might be able to put 
something together that just suits your company's need, however.

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite

[3] https://github.com/openstack/ironic/tree/master/ironic/drivers