Lenovo XClarity Driver

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bug/1702508

This specification proposes to add new interfaces that provide Ironic support to Lenovo XClarity managed servers. Servers that are supported by XClarity today are provided in the references at the end of this specification.

Problem description

Lenovo servers use an IMM GUI which brings forth a unique way of managing the nodes. The nodes need to be created, managed and operated by the XClarity Administrator GUI tool and are identified by a unique host id.

In addition to managing the nodes using IPMI protocol, this specification proposes to add hardware types and interfaces to manage Lenovo servers using XClarity Administrator RESTful API. The REST API documentation for XClarity is provided in the references at the end of the document. Benefits of using XClarity over plain IPMI are: better user management, hardware monitoring and hardware management.

Proposed change

New power and management interfaces will be added as part of this change.

The interfaces use RESTful API to communicate with XClarity Administrator. The interfaces used are:

  • XClarity.XClarityPower for Power operations

  • XClarity.XClarityManagement for Management operations

The XClarity Administrator RESTful API provides various operations, like controlling the power of nodes, retrieving firmware version and Feature on Demand(FoD) enablement information, etc.

The multiple interfaces embed the client side code for communicating with XClarity API via HTTP/HTTPS protocol, as a simple wrapper class. For all the interfaces, an “xclarity-client” will to be imported. The xclarity-client is available at https://pypi.python.org/simple/xclarity-client/.

  • Power:

    This feature allows the user to turn the node on/off or reboot by using the power interface which will in turn call XClarity’s REST API.

  • Management:

    This feature allows the user to get and set the primary boot device of the Lenovo servers, and to get the supported boot devices.

Alternatives

Use of the generic IPMI interfaces and pre-existing deploy interfaces is an alternative especially in mixed configurations.

Data model impact

None

RPC API impact

None

State Machine Impact

None

REST API impact

None

Client (CLI) impact

None

Driver API impact

None

Nova driver impact

None

Security impact

Use of HTTPS for this interface, and verifying certificates is more secure than IPMI-based interfaces.

Lenovo XClarity Administrator uses certificates to establish secure, trusted communications between XClarity and its managed devices. By default, the managed devices use XClarity-generated certificates. The user can choose to let Lenovo XClarity Administrator manage certificates, or customize and replace the server certificates. XClarity provides options for customizing certificates depending on the user’s requirements.

Other end user impact

None

Scalability impact

There are some locking considerations when we are dealing with scale. All locking is within a primary job/task framework which are profile activation, firmware update, and OS deploy. A client will initiate a job on an XClarity API endpoint, at which time it is locked from other jobs or client actions until the job completes.

There is an additional mechanism used by Firmware Updates to prevent inventory from refreshing from events, so commands are not sent to the IMM during the update. A second level of locking is when a client attempts power actions, and during the power request the endpoint is locked. This is generally very quick though.

Performance Impact

Lenovo XClarity Administrator supports the management of up to 20 chassis with compute nodes and a similar number of rack servers. An operator with a large number of systems being managed by XClarity should expect reduced system performance. Performance considerations have been provided in references at the end of this specification.

Ramdisk impact

None

Other deployer impact

The following driver_info fields are required while enrolling node into Ironic:

  • xclarity_address: XClarity Administrator IP-Address

  • xclarity_username: XClarity Administrator username

  • xclarity_password: XClarity Administrator password

  • xclarity_hostid: The host ID that is allocated by XClarity Administrator for each managed host.

  • xclarity_port(optional): The port used for establishing xClarity Administrator connection. Default is 443.

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Hu Bian (hubian1@lenovo.com)

Other contributors:

Jia Pei (jiapei2@lenovo.com) Haijun Mao (maohj2@lenovo.com) Finix Lei (leilei4@lenovo.com) Rushil Chugh (crushil)

Work Items

  • Add new XClarity hardware type, and adding new interfaces for Power and Management.

  • Writing appropriate unit tests to provide test coverage for XClarity driver.

  • Writing configuration documents.

  • Third party CI-setup.

Dependencies

None

Testing

  • Unit tests will be implemented for new XClarity driver.

  • Third party Continuous integration (CI) support will be added for Lenovo servers.

Upgrades and Backwards Compatibility

None

Documentation Impact

  • Updating Ironic documentation section Enabling Drivers with XClarity related instructions.

References