Redfish hardware type and interfaces

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bug/1526477

This specification proposes the addition of a new redfish hardware type, power and management interfaces in order to support ironic deployment on Redfish compliant servers.

Problem description

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has published a new specification called Redfish (refer to http://www.dmtf.org/standards/redfish) to provide a RESTful based API to manage servers in a standard way. This specification aims at adding support to ironic for controlling Redfish compliant servers.

Proposed change

This spec proposes adding a new redfish hardware type, power and management interfaces. None of which will be enabled by default.

The new interfaces will use the sushy library in order to handle the communication between the driver and the Redfish controller.

This library may be switched to python-redfish in the future after re-evaluation by the ironic community. The switch to python-redfish is outside the scope of this specification, but it should not cause any public interface to be changed. It would most likely involve code changes and new configuration options.

Note that no OEM specific extension will be supported.

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

None

RPC API impact

None

State Machine Impact

None

REST API impact

None

Driver API impact

None

Nova driver impact

None

Ramdisk impact

None

Security impact

None

Client (CLI) impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Scalability impact

None

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

The following driver_info fields are required while enrolling nodes into ironic:

  • redfish_address: The URL address to the Redfish controller. It should include scheme and authority portion of the URL. For example: https://mgmt.vendor.com

  • redfish_system_id: The canonical path to the ComputerSystem resource that the driver will interact with. It should include the root service, version and the unique resource path to a ComputerSystem within the same authority as the redfish_address property. For example: /redfish/v1/Systems/1

  • redfish_username: User account with admin/server-profile access privilege. Although this property is not mandatory it’s highly recommended to set a username. Optional

  • redfish_password: User account password. Although this property is not mandatory it’s highly recommended to set a password. Optional

  • redfish_verify_ca: This property contains either a boolean value, a path to a CA_BUNDLE file or directory with certificates of trusted CAs. If set to True the driver will verify the host certificates; if False the driver will ignore verifying the SSL certificate; If it’s a path the driver will use the specified certificate or one of the certificates in the directory. Defaults to True. Optional

For more information about the expected syntax of the redfish_system_id property check the Resource identifier property section of the DMTF specification.

The following new configuration variables are proposed (and their default values) to be added to the conductor variable group:

  • [redfish]/connection_attempts

    Maximum number of attempts to try to connect to Redfish.

  • [redfish]/connection_retry_interval

    Number of seconds to wait between attempts to connect to Redfish.

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

  • bcornec

  • lucasagomes

Other contributors:

  • ribaudr

Work Items

  • Add a new redfish hardware type, power and management interfaces.

  • Write unit-tests for the new code.

  • Modify the ironic DevStack module to setup a virtual environment that is able to test nodes using the new Redfish driver.

  • Write documentation.

Dependencies

The new redfish power and management interfaces will require the sushy library to be installed on the conductor node.

Testing

Unit-tests will be implemented for Redfish support.

DevStack will be updated to setup the nodes with the redfish driver and the libvirt mockup that is shipped with Sushy allowing it to be tests in gate against virtual machines.

Upgrades and Backwards Compatibility

This driver will not break any compatibility with either the REST API or the RPC API.

Documentation Impact

References