IPA works with the agent Deploy driver in Ironic to provision nodes. Starting with ironic-python-agent running on a ramdisk on an unprovisioned node, Ironic makes API calls to ironic-python-agent to provision the machine. This allows for greater control and flexibility of the entire deployment process.
IPA may also be used with the original Ironic pxe driver as of the Kilo OpenStack Ironic release.
On startup, the agent performs a lookup in Ironic to determine its node UUID
by sending a hardware profile to the Ironic lookup endpoint:
/v1/lookup.
After successfully looking up its node, the agent heartbeats via
/v1/heartbeat/{node_ident} every N seconds, where
N is the Ironic conductor’s agent.heartbeat_timeout value multiplied by a
number between .3 and .6.
For example, if your conductor’s ironic.conf contains:
[agent]
heartbeat_timeout = 60
IPA will heartbeat between every 20 and 36 seconds. This is to ensure jitter for any agents reconnecting after a network or API disruption.
After the agent heartbeats, the conductor performs any actions needed against the node, including querying status of an already run command. For example, initiating in-band cleaning tasks or deploying an image to the node.
IPA can conduct hardware inspection on start up and post data to the Ironic
Inspector. Edit your default PXE/iPXE configuration or IPA options
baked in the image, and set ipa-inspection-callback-url to the
full endpoint of Ironic Inspector, for example:
ipa-inspection-callback-url=http://IP:5050/v1/continue
Make sure your DHCP environment is set to boot IPA by default.
IPA collects various hardware information using its Hardware Managers, and sends it to Ironic on lookup and to Ironic Inspector on Inspection.
The exact format of the inventory depends on the hardware manager used. Here is the basic format expected to be provided by all hardware managers. The inventory is a dictionary (JSON object), containing at least the following fields:
cpumodel_name, frequency, count,
architecture and flags.memoryRAM information: total (total size in bytes), physical_mb
(physically installed memory size in MiB, optional).
Note
The difference is that the latter includes the memory region reserved
by the kernel and is always slightly bigger. It also matches what
the Nova flavor would contain for this node and thus is used by the
inspection process instead of total.
bmc_addressdisksname, model,
size (in bytes), rotational (boolean), wwn, serial,
vendor, wwn_with_extension, wwn_vendor_extension, hctl
and by_path (the full disk path, in the form
/dev/disk/by-path/<rest-of-path>).interfacesname, mac_address,
ipv4_address, lldp, vendor, product, and optionally
biosdevname``(BIOS given NIC name). If configuration option
``collect_lldp is set to True the lldp field will be populated
by a list of type-length-value(TLV) fields retrieved using the
Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).system_vendordmidecode:
product_name, serial_number and manufacturer.bootcurrent_boot_mode (boot mode used for
the current boot - BIOS or UEFI) and pxe_interface (interface used
for PXE booting, if any).| [0] | Enabling Drivers - https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/admin/drivers/ipa.html |
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