Open Stack

Excerpts from Andrew Bogott's message of 2015-09-16 10:03:48 -0700:
> My users are mostly happy with VMs, but I get occasional requests for 
> physical hardware in order to host databases, run performance tests, 
> etc.  I'd love to rack a dozen small servers and graft the ironic 
> service onto my existing cloud in order to fulfill these sporadic 
> needs.  I'm given pause, though, by this doc section:
> 
> http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/deploy/install-guide.html#configure-compute-to-use-the-bare-metal-service
> 
> For example, this:
> 
>      compute_driver=nova.virt.ironic.IronicDriver
> 
> 
> That would have me changing nova settings in such a way that would 
> clearly make nova /only/ support bare-metal, disabling its 
> virtualization facilities.  Does that mean that bare metal is really an 
> either/or proposition, or is there some way to make bare metal and virt 
> services coexist on a single nova installation?  Or is there an 
> in-between option that involves installing a second nova stack on 
> different nodes with a different config?
> 
> -- Bonus Question --
> 
> I'm still using nova-network.  Is anyone using ironic without neutron?  
> Or, if not, is that at least theoretically possible?
> 

Yes, you need to use host aggregates. You would put the ironic compute
hosts into an aggregate, and all of the other compute hosts into another,
and then have the extra_specs in the flavor set to whichever aggregate
you want the instance to go to.

This can definitely get a little tricky with the networking if you're
using overlays, since Ironic can't really attach a hardware node to a
software managed L2 network, but you can just make sure users understand
which networks will be available on which flavors and that should work.