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. Operators will have to manually delete the Bare Metal service ports for which physical media is not connected.

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

1. Out-of-band inspection is currently implemented by several hardware types, including ilo, idrac and irmc.
2. In-band inspection by utilizing the ironic-inspector project.

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:

penstack 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. In-band inspection is using the ironic-inspector project.

It is supported by all hardware types, and used by default, if enabled, by the ipmi hardware type. The inspector inspect interface has to be enabled to use it:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_inspect_interfaces = inspector,no-inspect

If the ironic-inspector service is not registered in the service catalog, set the following option:

[inspector]
endpoint_override = http://inspector.example.com:5050

In order to ensure that ports in Bare Metal service are synchronized with NIC ports on the node, the following settings in the ironic-inspector configuration file must be set:

[processing]
add_ports = all
keep_ports = present

There are two modes of in-band inspection: managed inspection and unmanaged inspection.

Managed inspection

Inspection is managed when the Bare Metal conductor fully configures the node for inspection, including setting boot device, boot mode and power state. This is the only way to conduct inspection using Virtual media boot or with Layer 3 or DHCP-less ramdisk booting. This mode is engaged automatically when the node has sufficient information to configure boot (e.g. ports in case of iPXE).

There are a few configuration options that tune managed inspection, the most important is extra_kernel_params, which allows adding kernel parameters for inspection specifically. This is where you can configure inspection collectors and other parameters, for example:

[inspector]
extra_kernel_params = ipa-inspection-collectors=default,logs ipa-collect-lldp=1

For the callback URL the ironic-inspector endpoint from the service catalog is used. If you want to override the endpoint for callback only, set the following option:

[inspector]
callback_endpoint_override = https://example.com/baremetal-introspection/v1/continue

Unmanaged inspection

Under unmanaged inspection we understand in-band inspection orchestrated by ironic-inspector or a third party. This was the only inspection mode before the Ussuri release, and it is still used when the node’s boot cannot be configured by the conductor. The options described above do not affect unmanaged inspection. See ironic-inspector installation guide for more information.

If you want to prevent unmanaged inspection from working, set this option:

[inspector]
require_managed_boot = True