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).

Configuration

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