ironic/doc/source/admin/drivers/ibmc.rst

iBMC driver

Overview

Warning

The ibmc driver has been deprecated and is anticipated to be removed from Ironic at some point during or after the 2024.2 development cycle. The anticipated forward management path is to migrate to the redfish hardware type.

The ibmc driver is targeted for Huawei V5 series rack server such as 2288H V5, CH121 V5. The iBMC hardware type enables the user to take advantage of features of Huawei iBMC to control Huawei server.

The ibmc hardware type supports the following Ironic interfaces:

• Management Interface: Boot device management
• Power Interface: Power management
• RAID Interface: RAID controller and disk management
• Vendor Interface: ibmc passthru interfaces

Prerequisites

The HUAWEI iBMC Client library should be installed on the ironic conductor

node(s).

For example, it can be installed with pip:

sudo pip install python-ibmcclient

Enabling the iBMC driver

1. Add ibmc to the list of enabled_hardware_types, enabled_power_interfaces, enabled_vendor_interfaces and enabled_management_interfaces in /etc/ironic/ironic.conf. For example:

   [DEFAULT]
   ...
   enabled_hardware_types = ibmc
   enabled_power_interfaces = ibmc
   enabled_management_interfaces = ibmc
   enabled_raid_interfaces = ibmc
   enabled_vendor_interfaces = ibmc

2. Restart the ironic conductor service:

   sudo service ironic-conductor restart
   
   # Or, for RDO:
   sudo systemctl restart openstack-ironic-conductor

Registering a node with the iBMC driver

Nodes configured to use the driver should have the driver property set to ibmc.

The following properties are specified in the node's driver_info field:

• ibmc_address:

  The URL address to the ibmc controller. It must include the authority portion of the URL, and can optionally include the scheme. If the scheme is missing, https is assumed. For example: https://ibmc.example.com. This is required.

• ibmc_username:

  User account with admin/server-profile access privilege. This is required.

• ibmc_password:

  User account password. This is required.

• ibmc_verify_ca:

  If ibmc_address has the https scheme, the driver will use a secure (TLS) connection when talking to the ibmc controller. By default (if this is set to True), the driver will try to verify the host certificates. This can be set to the path of a certificate file or directory with trusted certificates that the driver will use for verification. To disable verifying TLS, set this to False. This is optional.

The baremetal node create command can be used to enroll a node with the ibmc driver. For example:

baremetal node create --driver ibmc
  --driver-info ibmc_address=https://example.com \
  --driver-info ibmc_username=admin \
  --driver-info ibmc_password=password

For more information about enrolling nodes see enrollment in the install guide.

RAID Interface

Currently, only RAID controller which supports OOB management can be managed.

See /admin/raid for more information on Ironic RAID support.

The following properties are supported by the iBMC raid interface implementation, ibmc:

Mandatory properties

• size_gb: Size in gigabytes (integer) for the logical disk. Use MAX as size_gb if this logical disk is supposed to use the rest of the space available.
• raid_level: RAID level for the logical disk. Valid values are JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, 5+0 and 6+0. And it is possible that some RAID controllers can only support a subset RAID levels.

Note

RAID level 2 is not supported by iBMC driver.

Optional properties

• is_root_volume: Optional. Specifies whether this disk is a root volume. By default, this is False.
• volume_name: Optional. Name of the volume to be created. If this is not specified, it will be N/A.

Backing physical disk hints

See /admin/raid for more information on backing disk hints.

These are machine-independent properties. The hints are specified for each logical disk to help Ironic find the desired disks for RAID configuration.

• share_physical_disks
• disk_type
• interface_type
• number_of_physical_disks

Backing physical disks

These are HUAWEI RAID controller dependent properties:

• controller: Optional. Supported values are: RAID storage id, RAID storage name or RAID controller name. If a bare metal server have more than one controller, this is mandatory. Typical values would look like:

  • RAID Storage Id: RAIDStorage0
  • RAID Storage Name: RAIDStorage0
  • RAID Controller Name: RAID Card1 Controller.

• physical_disks: Optional. Supported values are: disk-id, disk-name or disk serial number. Typical values for hdd disk would look like:

  • Disk Id: HDDPlaneDisk0
  • Disk Name: Disk0.
  • Disk SerialNumber: 38DGK77LF77D

Delete RAID configuration

For delete_configuration step, ibmc will do:

• delete all logical disks
• delete all hot-spare disks

Logical disks creation priority

Logical Disks creation priority based on three properties:

• share_physical_disks
• physical_disks
• size_gb

The logical disks creation priority strictly follow the table below, if multiple logical disks have the same priority, then they will be created with the same order in logical_disks array.

Share physical disks	Specified Physical Disks	Size
no	yes	int|max
no	no	int
yes	yes	int
yes	yes	max
yes	no	int
yes	no	max
no	no	max

Physical disks choice strategy

Note

physical-disk-group: a group of physical disks which have been used by some logical-disks with same RAID level.

• If no physical_disks are specified, the "waste least" strategy will be used to choose the physical disks.

  • waste least disk capacity: when using disks with different capacity, it will cause a waste of disk capacity. This is to avoid with highest priority.
  • using least total disk capacity: for example, we can create 400G RAID 5 with both 5 100G-disks and 3 200G-disks. 5 100G disks is a better strategy because it uses a 500G capacity totally. While 3 200G-disks are 600G totally.
  • using least disk count: finally, if waste capacity and total disk capacity are both the same (it rarely happens?), we will choose the one with the minimum number of disks.

• when share_physical_disks option is present, ibmc driver will create logical disk upon existing physical-disk-group list first. Only when no existing physical-disk-group matches, then it chooses unused physical disks with same strategy described above. When multiple exists physical-disk-groups matches, it will use "waste least" strategy too, the bigger capacity left the better. For example, to create a logical disk shown below on a ibmc server which has two RAID5 logical disks already. And the shareable capacity of this two logical-disks are 500G and 300G, then ibmc driver will choose the second one.

  {
     "logical_disks": [
         {
             "controller": "RAID Card1 Controller",
             "raid_level": "5",
             "size_gb": 100,
             "share_physical_disks": true
         }
     ]
  }

  And the ibmc server has two RAID5 logical disks already.

• When size_gb is set to MAX, ibmc driver will auto work through all possible cases and choose the "best" solution which has the biggest capacity and use least capacity. For example: to create a RAID 5+0 logical disk with MAX size in a server has 9 200G-disks, it will finally choose "8 disks + span-number 2" but not "9 disks + span-number 3". Although they both have 1200G capacity totally, but the former uses only 8 disks and the latter uses 9 disks. If you want to choose the latter solution, you can specified the disk count to use by adding number_of_physical_disks option.

  {
     "logical_disks": [
         {
             "controller": "RAID Card1 Controller",
             "raid_level": "5+0",
             "size_gb": "MAX"
         }
     ]
  }

Examples

In a typical scenario we may want to create:

• RAID 5, 500G, root OS volume with 3 disks
• RAID 5, rest available space, data volume with rest disks

{
  "logical_disks": [
      {
          "volume_name": "os_volume",
          "controller": "RAID Card1 Controller",
          "is_root_volume": "True",
          "physical_disks": [
              "Disk0",
              "Disk1",
              "Disk2"
          ],
          "raid_level": "5",
          "size_gb": "500"
      },
      {
          "volume_name": "data_volume",
          "controller": "RAID Card1 Controller",
          "raid_level": "5",
          "size_gb": "MAX"
      }
  ]
}

Vendor Interface

The ibmc hardware type provides vendor passthru interfaces shown below:

Method Name	HTTP Method	Description
boot_up_seq	GET	Query boot up sequence
get_raid_controller_list	GET	Query RAID controller summary info