UEFI iSCSI Boot for iLO drivers

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bug/1526861

HPE ProLiant Servers (Gen9 and beyond) supports UEFI iSCSI Boot through its firmware. The proposed feature is to add support for this firmware based booting of an iSCSI Cinder volume in UEFI mode for Ironic iLO drivers.

Problem description

Currently, Ironic has ability to boot from Cinder volume. Moreover, this support is to boot from an iSCSI volume using bootloaders like iPXE. It doesn’t provide any way to harness the feature of some servers which inherently supports booting from an iSCSI volume using their firmware capabilities. Hardware can be configured programmatically to boot from an iSCSI volume through firmware.

Proposed change

This change is based on the reference driver implementation guidelines proposed by Boot from Volume - Reference Drivers spec to support booting ironic nodes from a storage device that is hosted and/or controlled remotely. This change proposes two new methods for iLO drivers management interface; namely set_iscsi_boot_target and clear_iscsi_boot_target, which will facilitate setting and clearing iSCSI target information using iLO interfaces for UEFI iSCSI boot capable HPE Proliant servers.

The boot interface method prepare_instance() in ilo hardware type will check if the instance requested boot mode is ‘UEFI’ and given volume is bootable. If so, it will set the iSCSI target in the iLO and set boot device to iSCSI target.

If the instance requested boot mode is ‘BIOS’ the behavior for the two boot interfaces (ilo-pxe and ilo-virtual-media) will be as under:

  • ilo-pxe : It will fallback to iPXE to boot the volume.

  • ilo-virtual-media: It will throw the following error:

    virtual media cannot boot volume in bios.

    The function definition for ilo-pxe boot interface with its pseudo-code will be as follows:

    class IloPXEBoot(pxe.PXEBoot):

  def prepare_instance(self, task):
    """Prepares the boot of instance.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    :returns: None
    :raises: IloOperationError, if some operation on iLO failed.
    """
    if deploy_utils.is_iscsi_boot(task) and boot_mode == 'uefi':
      #Call the management interface
      task.driver.management.set_iscsi_boot_target(task)
      #Set boot device to 'ISCSIBOOT'
      deploy_utils.try_set_boot_device(task, boot_devices.ISCSIBOOT)

    else:
      #Let iPXE handle this
      super(IloPXEBoot, self).prepare_instance(task)

  def clean_up_instance(self, task):
    """Cleans up the boot of instance.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    :returns: None
    :raises: IloOperationError, if some operation on iLO failed.
    """
    if deploy_utils.is_iscsi_boot(task) and boot_mode == 'uefi':
      #Call the management interface
      task.driver.management.clear_iscsi_boot_target(task)

    else:
      #Let iPXE handle this
      super(IloPXEBoot, self).clean_up_instance(task)

    The function definition for ilo-virtual-media boot interface with its pseudo-code will be as follows:

    class IloVirtualMediaBoot(base.BootInterface):

  def prepare_instance(self, task):
    """Prepares the boot of instance.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    :returns: None
    :raises: IloOperationError, if some operation on iLO failed.
    """
    if deploy_utils.is_iscsi_boot(task) and boot_mode == 'uefi':
      #Call the management interface
      task.driver.management.set_iscsi_boot_target(task)
      #Set boot device to 'ISCSIBOOT'
      deploy_utils.try_set_boot_device(task, boot_devices.ISCSIBOOT)
      return

    elif deploy_utils.is_iscsi_boot(task) and boot_mode == 'bios':
      #Throw the error in bios boot mode
      msg = 'virtual media can not boot volume in bios mode.'
      raise exception.InstanceDeployFailure(msg)

    else:
      #Default code

  def clean_up_instance(self, task):
    """Cleans up the boot of instance.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    :returns: None
    :raises: IloOperationError, if some operation on iLO failed.
    """
    if deploy_utils.is_iscsi_boot(task) and boot_mode == 'uefi':
      #Call the management interface
      task.driver.management.clear_iscsi_boot_target(task)
    else:
      #Fall to virtual media cleanup

Two new methods will be added in ilo drivers management interface ilo.management.IloManangement: * set_iscsi_boot_target() - To set iSCSI target information into iLO * clear_iscsi_boot_target() - To clear iSCSI target information from iLO

New version of proliantutils library would be released that supports the above mentioned methods.

The function definition with its pseudo-code will be as follows:

class IloManagement(base.ManagementInterface):

  def set_iscsi_boot_target(self, task):
    """Set iscsi boot volume target info from the node.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    """
    #Proliants call to set iscsi target info

  def clear_iscsi_boot_target(self, task):
    """Clear iscsi boot volume target info from the node.

    :param task: a task from TaskManager.
    """
    #Library call to clear iscsi target info

Alternatives

None.

Data model impact

None.

State Machine Impact

None.

REST API impact

None.

Client (CLI) impact

None.

RPC API impact

None.

Driver API impact

None.

Nova driver impact

None.

Security impact

None.

Ramdisk impact

None.

Other end user impact

None.

Scalability impact

None.

Performance Impact

None.

Other deployer impact

Deployers will be able to configure server which support UEFI iSCSI boot with this change. The workflow will be as follows:

  • Operator configures the node with appropriate hardware type with boot interface and adds the capability iscsi_boot=true in node.properties['capabilities'] (or it could be populated by inspection, but it’s not part of this spec on how it gets populated).

  • Operator creates a flavor with Compute capability iscsi_boot=true to request bare metal booting from Cinder volume.

  • Tenant creates a Cinder volume.

  • Tenant requests a bare metal instance to be booted up with a Cinder volume with the above mentioned flavor.

  • Node having ‘ilo-virtual-media’ as boot interface with capability ‘iscsi_boot=true’ should also have capability ‘boot_mode’ configured to ‘uefi’ only.

  • Nova Ironic virt driver passes information about iSCSI volume to Ironic. For more information, refer ironic spec Add volume connection information for Ironic nodes.

Developer impact

None.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

kesper

Other contributors:

deray stendulker

Work Items

  • Need to add changes in ilo-pxe and ilo-virtual-media boot interfaces.

  • Need to implement set_iscsi_boot_target and clear_iscsi_boot_target in ilo management interface.

Dependencies

None.

Testing

This feature would be tested using HPE iLO third-party CI.

Upgrades and Backwards Compatibility

None.

Documentation Impact

iLO drivers documentation will be updated for this feature.

References