Open Stack

On 17/10/20 7:29 am, Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:
> 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?

As far as I'm aware, an IPMI host:port endpoint will manage exactly one 
baremetal host, with no obvious mechanism to specify which host to 
control when you have multiple hosts behind a single endpoint. These 
days with the rise of Redfish I think IPMI is considered a legacy 
interface now.

I suspect a BMC interface is not the right abstraction for a 
multi-tenant baremetal API, that's why Ironic was started in the first 
place ;)

If there are provisioning tools frequently used by the target audience 
of Mass Open Cloud which have poor Ironic API support then we'd like to 
know what those tools are so we can improve that support.


> Thanks!
>
> [1] https://github.com/CCI-MOC/esi
> [2] https://github.com/openstack/virtualbmc
>