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 two 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, also known as Agent inspection utilizing Ironic Python Agent to collect information.

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>

Functionality

• Node auto-discovery
  • Limitations
• Inspection data
  • Inventory
  • Plugin data
  • Data storage
• Inspection hooks
  • Configuring hooks
  • Default hooks
  • Optional hooks
• Inspection Rules
  • Actions & Conditions
  • Loops
  • Variable Interpolation
• Capabilities discovery
• Managed and unmanaged inspection
  • Managed inspection
  • Unmanaged inspection
• PXE filter service
  • How it works?
  • Installation
  • Scale considerations
• Migrating from ironic-inspector
  • Understand the feature differences
  • Migration process
• Copy inspection data between Swift buckets

Agent Inspection

Agent inspection (also known as 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.

Note

The implementation described in this document is not 100% compatible with the previous one (based on ironic-inspector). Check the documentation and the release notes for which features are currently available.

Configuration

Agent inspection is supported by all hardware types. The agent inspect interface has to be enabled to use it:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_inspect_interfaces = agent,redfish,no-inspect

You can make agent the default if you want all nodes to use it automatically:

[DEFAULT]
default_inspect_interface = agent

Of course, you can configure agent per node:

$ baremetal node set --inspect-interface agent <NODE>