Ironic is an OpenStack project that provisions bare metal machines by leveraging technologies like PXE and IPMI. It supports pluggable driver interfaces to enable vendor-specific functionality. Ironic's components include the Ironic API service, Ironic Conductor service, and Nova compute driver. Ironic uses PXE, DHCP, and TFTP to boot nodes. It deploys ramdisk agents using technologies like IPMI. TripleO leverages Ironic for bare metal provisioning and provides full OpenStack deployment and management capabilities.

1. IRONIC
OPENSTACK BAREMETAL PROVISIONING SERVICE
Hao Meng, Wang
IRC: Haomeng
whaom@cn.ibm.com
June, 2014

2. 2
AGENDA
•
Bare Metal Provision Domain
•
Why Provision Bare Metal(BM)
•
Provision Methods & Scenarios
•
Key Technologies for BM Provision
•
PXE ROM & NBP
•
IPMI Functions
•
IPMI Block Diagram
•
IPMI + PXE Provising Workflow
•
Ironic
•
About Ironic
•
Architecture
•
Conceptual
•
Logical
•
Framework
•
Components
•
BM Provision Sequence Diagram
•
Data Model
•
Images used by Ironic
•
Commands
•
How to use Ironic
•
TripleO

3. 3
Why Provision Bare Metal(BM)
•
Database/Hadoop hosting (some
databases run poorly in a hypervisor)
•
Single tenant, dedicated hardware for
performance, security, dependability and
other regulatory requirements
•
Computing tasks that require access to
hardware devices which can’t be
virtualized
•
High-performance computing(HPC) clusters, physical compute nodes
•
Or, rapidly deploying a cloud infrastructure self, TripleO or others
•
Cloud scaling out
•
X86_64, ARM, TILE-Gx16/36/64/100 systems
•
SoftLayer / Racespace Cloud supports bare-metal as service

4. 4
Provision Methods & Scenarios
•
Methods
•
CLONE – ghost/dd
•
INSTALL – JumpStart/KickStart/OS Installer
•
CLONE + INSTALL
•
Scenarios
•
Diskful
•
HD/SSD
•
iSCSI/SAN disk
•
Diskless
•
RAM Disk

5. 5
Key Technologies for BM Provision
•
PXE Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) is part of the Wired for Management (WfM) specification
developed by Intel and Microsoft. Booting computers via a network.
•
NBP Network Bootstrap Program (NBP) is equivalent to GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) or LILO
(LInux LOader) - loaders which are traditionally used in local booting. Like the boot program in a hard
drive environment, the NBP is responsible for loading the OS kernel into memory so that the OS can be
bootstrapped over a network.
•
IPMI Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standardized computer system interface
used by system administrators for out-of-band management of computer systems and monitoring of
their operation.
•
DHCP Using PXE, the BIOS uses DHCP to obtain an IP address for the network interface and to
locate the server that stores the network bootstrap program (NBP).
•
TFTP Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is a simple file transfer protocol that is generally used for
automated transfer of configuration or boot files between machines in a local environment. In a PXE
environment, TFTP is used to download NBP over the network using information from the DHCP
server.
•
iSCSI Internet Small Computer System Interface, uses this to 'dd' the image to target machnie
local disk

6. 6
PXE ROM & NBP (bootloader,pxelinux.0)
PXE ROM Chip

7. 7
NBP bootloader config file sample
default deploy
label deploy
kernel /tftpboot/76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8/deploy_kernel
append initrd=/tftpboot/76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8/deploy_ramdisk selinux=0
disk=cciss/c0d0,sda,hda,vda iscsi_target_iqn=iqn-76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8
deployment_id=76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8
deployment_key=UKKQZ3N2AOUJ45NZVB27L25XKR6I57V8 ironic_api_url=http://192.0.2.1:6385
troubleshoot=0 nofb nomodeset vga=normal
label boot
kernel /tftpboot/76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8/kernel
append initrd=/tftpboot/76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8/ramdisk root=UUID=319005ff-9177-45af-
87db-ada3a1f6dc9f ro nofb nomodeset vga=normal

8. 8
IPMI Functions
•
power Shortcut to chassis power commands
•
chassis bootdev Set the boot device
•
sensor Print detailed sensor information
•
sol Configure and connect IPMIv2.0 Serial-over-LAN
•
...

9. 9
IPMI Block Diagram
IPMI Port

10. 10
IPMI NIC Port

11. 11
“Ironic is an Incubated OpenStack project which aims to
provision bare metal (as opposed to virtual) machines by
leveraging common technologies such as PXE boot and IPMI
to cover a wide range of hardware, while supporting
pluggable drivers to allow vendor-specific functionality to be
added.”
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/
About Ironic

12. 12
Conceptual Architecture

13. 13
Logical Architecture

14. 14
Framework

15. 15
Ironic Components
•
Ironic-api
•
handles the remote api requests
•
Ironic-conductor
•
talk with physical machines
•
Nova compute driver
•
Implements the nova virt.ComputeDriver.
•
Direct the calls to Ironic
•
CLI client
•
Ironic deployment ramdisk agent
•
Built by diskimage-builder
•
Deploy by PXE, talk with Ironic-
conductor
RAMDISK Agent - https://github.com/openstack/diskimage-builder/tree/master/elements/deploy-ironic

16. 16
Juno Teeth Agent
•
In Juno release, a new ramdisk agent will be introduced to Ironic by
RackSapce. (teeth agent) The new name is Ironic Python Agent
•
Supports:
•
Partition disks
•
Erase disks
•
Install bootloaders
•
Install an OS image
•
Update firmware
•
Configure RAID and more....
•
A new DeployInterface driver will be written to communicate with the new
Teeth agent.

17. 17
Ironic BM Provision Sequence Diagram

18. 18
Ironic Objects Model

19. 19
Images used by Ironic
●
NBP
– Ironic.conf pxe_bootfile_name
– default pxelinux.0
●
Ironic Deployment Agent
– bm-deploy-kernel / bm-deploy-ramdisk
– BM flavor's extra_specs data –
baremetal:deploy_kernel_id/baremetal:deploy_ramdisk_id
●
User Image – to be deployed to bm
– user-image/
– user-image-vmlinuz
– user-image-initrd
– Images' kernel_id/ramdisk_id ext props
•

20. 20
Ironic Commands
•
node-create - Create a new node.
•
node-delete - Delete a node.
•
node-get-console - return the connection information about the console.
•
node-list - list nodes.
•
node-set-console-mode - Enable or disable the console access.
•
node-set-power-state - Power the node on or off.
•
node-set-provision-state - Provision or tear down a node.
•
node-show - Show a node.
•
node-update - Upate a node.
•
node-validate - Validate the node driver interfaces.

21. 21
Ironic Commands
•
port-create - Create a new port.
•
port-delete - Delete a port.
•
port-list - List ports.
•
port-show - Show a port.
•
port-update - Update a port.
•
chassis-create - Create a new chassis.
•
chassis-delete - Delete a chassis.
•
chassis-list - List chassis.
•
chassis-node-list - List the nodes contained in the chassis.
•
chassis-show - Show a chassis.
•
chassis-update - Update a chassis.
•
driver-list - List drivers.
•
driver-show - Show a driver.

22. 22
How to use Ironic
•
Install Ironic - Try with devstack or TripleO's Devtest, it supports Ironic for long time
– http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/dev/dev-quickstart.html#deploying-ironic-with-devstack
– https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Tuskar/Devtest
•
Setup the compute node's nova.conf
•
compute_driver = ironic.nova.virt.ironic.driver.IronicDriver
•
scheduler_host_manager = ironic.nova.scheduler.ironic_host_manager.IronicHostManager
•
Setup tftp folder and prepare pxe boot loader file
•
# cp pxelinux.0 /YOUR_TFTP_FOLDER/
•
Prepare the baremetal flavor
•
# nova flavor-create <name> <id> <ram> <disk> <vcpus>
•
# nova flavor-key baremetal set "cpu_arch"="$ARCH" "baremetal:deploy_kernel_id"="$deploy_kernel_id"
"baremetal:deploy_ramdisk_id"="$deploy_ramdisk_id"
•
Register these nodes with correct drivers
•
# ironic node-create driver=pxe_ipmitool
•
Register the ports information
•
# ironic port-create -a aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff -n 76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8
•
Nova boot to kick off the baremetal provision
•
Check node's provision_state/power_state value
•
# ironic node-show 76305cdf-a30a-453e-bc92-b3f869a27fd8

23. 23
TripleO
•
TripleO = OpenStack on OpenStack
•
INFO: May 2014 at the Atlanta Summit: both RedHat's (InStack) and HP's
(Helion) OpenStack distributions are now based on TripleO

24. 24
TripleO – Covers full DevOps
TripleO = NovaBM/Ironic
+ os-collect-config
+ os-apply-config
+ os-refresh-config
+ os-cloud-config
+ diskimage-builder (dib)
+ tripleo-image-elements (dib)
+ tripleo-heat-elements (dib)
+ Tuskar(tuskar/tuskarui/python-tuskarclient)

25. 25
TripleO – Block Diagram
v

26. 26
PC
Seed VM
Undercloud
Overcloud
Controller
Overcloud
Compute
Overcloud
Compute
Workload
Workload Workload
$ heat stack-create
undercloud
$ heat stack-create
overcloud
$ heat stack-create
workload
Seed / under / over Clouds in TripleO

27. 27
References
•
Ironic wiki - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic
•
PXE Spec - http://download.intel.com/design/archives/wfm/downloads/pxespec.pdf
•
IPMI overview - http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-
briefs/ipmi-overview.pdf
•
IPMI Spec - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/servers/ipmi/ipmi-specifications.html
•
TripleO - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO

28. THANK YOU