Hardware Inspection

Overview

Inspection allows Bare Metal service to discover required node properties once required driver_info fields (for example, IPMI credentials) are set by an operator. Inspection will also create the Bare Metal service ports for the discovered ethernet MACs.

There are three kinds of inspection supported by Bare Metal service:

  1. Out-of-band inspection is currently implemented by several hardware types, including redfish, ilo, idrac and irmc.

  2. In-band inspection utilizing Ironic Python Agent to collect information.

  3. Older in-band inspection implementation utilizing the ironic-inspector project. This is now deprecated.

The node should be in the manageable state before inspection is initiated. If it is in the enroll or available state, move it to manageable first:

baremetal node manage <node_UUID>

Then inspection can be initiated using the following command:

baremetal node inspect <node_UUID>

Capabilities discovery

This is an incomplete list of capabilities we want to discover during inspection. The exact support is hardware and hardware type specific though, the most complete list is provided by the iLO Hardware Inspection Support.

secure_boot (true or false)

whether secure boot is supported for the node

boot_mode (bios or uefi)

the boot mode the node is using

cpu_vt (true or false)

whether the CPU virtualization is enabled

cpu_aes (true or false)

whether the AES CPU extensions are enabled

max_raid_level (integer, 0-10)

maximum RAID level supported by the node

pci_gpu_devices (non-negative integer)

number of GPU devices on the node

The operator can specify these capabilities in nova flavor for node to be selected for scheduling:

openstack flavor set my-baremetal-flavor --property capabilities:pci_gpu_devices="> 0"

openstack flavor set my-baremetal-flavor --property capabilities:secure_boot="true"

Please see a specific hardware type page for the exact list of capabilities this hardware type can discover.

In-band inspection

In-band inspection involves booting a ramdisk on the target node and fetching information directly from it. This process is more fragile and time-consuming than the out-of-band inspection, but it is not vendor-specific and works across a wide range of hardware.