Ironic

Introduction

The ironic hypervisor driver wraps the Bare Metal (ironic) API, enabling Nova to provision baremetal resources using the same user-facing API as for server management.

This is the only driver in nova where one compute service can map to many hosts, meaning a nova-compute service can manage multiple ComputeNodes. An ironic driver managed compute service uses the ironic node uuid for the compute node hypervisor_hostname (nodename) and uuid fields. The relationship of instance:compute node:ironic node is 1:1:1.

Scheduling of bare metal nodes is based on custom resource classes, specified via the resource_class property on a node and a corresponding resource property on a flavor (see the flavor documentation). The RAM and CPU settings on a flavor are ignored, and the disk is only used to determine the root partition size when a partition image is used (see the image documentation).

VNC console support

The nova noVNC VNC console service can connect to bare metal nodes when ironic has Graphical console support enabled and configured.

Configuration

• Configure the Compute service to use the Bare Metal service.

• Create flavors for use with the Bare Metal service.

• Conductors Groups.

Scaling and performance issues

• It is typical for a single nova-compute process to support several hundred Ironic nodes. There are known issues when you attempt to support more than 1000 Ironic nodes associated with a single nova-compute process, even though Ironic is able to scale out a single conductor group to much larger sizes. There are many other factors that can affect what is the maximum practical size of a conductor group within your deployment.

• The update_available_resource periodic task reports all the resources managed by Ironic. Depending the number of nodes, it can take a lot of time. The nova-compute will not perform any other operations when this task is running. You can use conductor groups to help shard your deployment between multiple nova-compute processes by setting ironic.conductor_group.

• The nova-compute process using the Ironic driver can be moved between different physical servers using active/passive failover. But when doing this failover, you must ensure host is the same no matter where the nova-compute process is running. Similarly you must ensure there are at most one nova-compute processes running for each conductor group.

• Running multiple nova-compute processes that point at the same conductor group is now deprecated. Please never have more than one host in the peer list: ironic.peer_list

Known limitations / Missing features

• Migrate

• Resize

• Snapshot

• Pause

• Shelve

• Evacuate