Migrating from ironic-inspector

This document outlines the process of migrating from a separate ironic-inspector service to the built-in in-band inspection.

Note

This is a live document that is updated as more ironic-inspector features are supported in ironic. If you’re upgrading to a branch other than master, use the version of this document from the target branch.

Understand the feature differences

Removed

Some rarely used or controversial features have not been migrated to ironic. This list currently includes:

Inspection rules have now been implemented as of 2025.1 “Epoxy” release.

New defaults

Built-in hooks

Most of the introspection hooks have been migrated to ironic, although many have been migrated for clarity and consistency.

Hooks mapping

Inspector

ironic

default_hooks?

Notes

accelerators

accelerators

No

capabilities

boot-mode, cpu-capabilities

No

Split into two logical parts.

extra_hardware

extra-hardware

No

python-hardware is not actively maintained any more.

lldp_basic

parse-lldp

No

local_link_connection

local-link-connection

No

pci_devices

pci-devices

No

physnet_cidr_map

physical-network

No

raid_device

raid-device

No

root_device

root-device

No

ramdisk_error

ramdisk-error

Yes

scheduler

architecture, memory

Only architecture

Split, dropped local_gb and vcpus support.

validate_interfaces

validate-interfaces, ports

Yes

Split into two logical parts.

Custom hooks

A custom hook (called processing hook in ironic-inspector) has to be derived from the base class InspectionHook. It differs from the older ProcessingHook in a few important ways, requiring custom hooks to be adapted for ironic:

  • Hooks operate on the regular task instead of the inspector-specific NodeInfo object.

  • Since changes to nodes and ports no longer require an API call, hooks are expected to commit their changes immediately rather than letting them accumulate on the task object.

  • The hook methods have been renamed: before_processing is called preprocess, the __call__ method is used instead of before_update.

  • Introspection data has been split into its inventory part and plugin data. Hooks should not update the inventory.

  • New hooks use the entry point ironic.inspection.hooks instead of ironic_inspector.hooks.processing.

Other concerns

  • There is no way to migrate the inspection data automatically. You need to repeat inspections or copy the data over manually.

Migration process

  1. Make sure you’re running at ironic 2024.1 or newer.

  2. Enable the new inspection implementation as described in In-Band Inspection.

  3. Carefully research options in the inventory and inspector sections. Update options to match similar ones in the ironic-inspector configuration.

  4. Enable the required Built-in hooks, taking into the account the new names and composition.

  5. If using network boot and unmanaged inspection or auto-discovery, configure unmanaged boot.

  6. If using the OpenStack Networking, consider configuring (but not starting yet) the PXE filter service.

  7. Make sure no inspection are running.

  8. Stop ironic-inspector or at least disable its PXE filter (it may conflict with the one used here).

  9. Start PXE filter service if needed. Restart the Bare Metal service.

  10. Change all nodes to use the new inspection interface, for example:

    baremetal node list --fields uuid inspect_interface -f value | while read uuid iface; do
    if [ "$iface" = "inspector" ]; then
        baremetal node set --inspect-interface agent "$uuid"
    fi
done

  11. Make sure your scripts use ironicclient and the Bare Metal API in OpenStackSDK instead of the client API that is specific to ironic-inspector.