Role Ironic

date:

2015-10-12 16:30

tags:

ansible, ironic

The purpose of this spec is to add support for the OpenStack Ironic program to OpenStack Ansible, allowing the provisioning of compute nodes to bare metal machines.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ansible/+spec/role-ironic

Problem description

Openstack Ansible currently does not support the provisioning of bare metal compute hosts, but this is functionality that operators and users are likely to want.

Proposed change

The Ironic program encompasses a number of projects, but this spec and this proposed series of changes covers the initial implementation of support for Ironic. This will involve adding support for the Ironic server[1] and Ironic client[2].

Future specs may be raised to cover the addition of ironic-inspector, or to support alternate deployment mechanisms, or to support different deployment drivers. The specific detail for these will be added in future specs.

This work will build upon the experiences learnt in developing bifrost[3] (which is a set of ansible playbooks for deploying Ironic standalone, without other OpenStack components).

The changes that are proposed as part of this spec are:

  • Creation of an openstack-ansible-ironic repository and ansible role to support the initial implementation of Ironic. This will allow openstack-ansible to deploy compute nodes to bare metal hosts, via the nova API. Initially, support will be limited to bare metal hosts that support IPMI for power control, and PXE for boot.

  • Tests to verify the new ansible role

Alternatives

None, really. Supporting bare metal hosts in OpenStack is done via using Ironic.

Playbook/Role impact

Test playbooks will be placed in the openstack-ansible-ironic repository for functional testing purposes, with no initially proposed changes to openstack-ansible playbooks.

In the future, once the ironic role is deemed useful and acceptible, a future spec will address the integration of the ironic role with the main openstack-ansible repository.

Upgrade impact

None

Security impact

None.

Performance impact

None.

End user impact

Deployers will be able to deploy compute nodes to bare metal hosts.

Deployer impact

Ironic specific configuration options will be added to the new repository. When support for the new Ironic role is added to the parent repository new config options will be made available, however it is expected that Ironic support will initially be disabled, requiring that deployers explicitly enable Ironic support, and to enrol hosts for openstack-ansible to use.

Developer impact

As this change is self-contained initially, no impact on other developers is expected.

Dependencies

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Michael Davies - mrda on Launchpad and on IRC

Other contributors:

None

Work items

  1. Ask for the new repository, openstack-ansible-ironic, to be created

  2. Create the role for ironic support

    • Add support for running ironic-api

    • Add support for running ironic-conductor

    • Add support for including python-ironicclient, which is the operator tool for supporting Ironic.

    • Add configuration to make configuring bare metal deployment easy

  3. Add support for enrolling bare metal nodes

  4. Add support for configuring Nova to use Ironic. Initially this will be in the form of documentation until the parent openstack-ansible repository is updated to use openstack-ansible-ironic

Testing

As this is testing deploying to hardware, this is challenging :)

Develop a test playbook to deploy to hardware that can exercise the new role. Develop tests that verify the role’s behaviour independent of actually requiring hardware to test the role’s functionality.

Documentation impact

Adding support to the user guide on how to enable Ironic support will be required.

References