ironic/doc/source/admin/drivers/ipa.rst
Dmitry Tantsur 929907d684 Bye-bye iSCSI deploy, you served us well
The iSCSI deploy was very easy to start with, but it has since become
apparently that it suffers from scalability and maintenance issues.
It was deprecated in the Victoria cycle and can now be removed.

Hide the guide to upgrade to hardware types since it's very outdated.

I had to remove the iBMC diagram since my SVG-fu is not enough to fix it.

Change-Id: I2cd6bf7b27fe0be2c08104b0cc37654b506b2e62
2021-05-04 14:28:25 +02:00

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===================
Ironic Python Agent
===================
Overview
========
*Ironic Python Agent* (also often called *IPA* or just *agent*) is a
Python-based agent which handles *ironic* bare metal nodes in a
variety of actions such as inspect, configure, clean and deploy images.
IPA is distributed over nodes and runs, inside of a ramdisk, the
process of booting this ramdisk on the node.
For more information see the
:ironic-python-agent-doc:`ironic-python-agent documentation <>`.
Drivers
=======
Starting with the Kilo release all deploy interfaces (except for fake ones) are
using IPA. For nodes using the :ref:`direct-deploy` interface, the conductor
prepares a swift temporary URL or a local HTTP URL for the image. IPA then
handles the whole deployment process: downloading an image from swift, putting
it on the machine and doing any post-deploy actions.
Requirements
------------
Using IPA requires it to be present and configured on the deploy ramdisk, see
:ref:`deploy-ramdisk`
.. _ipa-proxies:
Using proxies for image download
================================
Overview
--------
When using the :ref:`direct-deploy`, IPA supports using proxies for downloading
the user image. For example, this could be used to speed up download by using
a caching proxy.
Steps to enable proxies
-----------------------
#. Configure the proxy server of your choice (for example
`Squid <http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/>`_,
`Apache Traffic Server <https://docs.trafficserver.apache.org/en/latest/index.html>`_).
This will probably require you to configure the proxy server to cache the
content even if the requested URL contains a query, and to raise the maximum
cached file size as images can be pretty big. If you have HTTPS enabled in
swift (see :swift-doc:`swift deployment guide <deployment_guide.html>`),
it is possible to configure the proxy server to talk to swift via HTTPS
to download the image, store it in the cache unencrypted and return it to
the node via HTTPS again. Because the image will be stored unencrypted in
the cache, this approach is recommended for images that do not contain
sensitive information. Refer to your proxy server's documentation to
complete this step.
#. Set ``[glance]swift_temp_url_cache_enabled`` in the ironic conductor config
file to ``True``. The conductor will reuse the cached swift temporary URLs
instead of generating new ones each time an image is requested, so that the
proxy server does not create new cache entries for the same image, based on
the query part of the URL (as it contains some query parameters that change
each time it is regenerated).
#. Set ``[glance]swift_temp_url_expected_download_start_delay`` option in the
ironic conductor config file to the value appropriate for your hardware.
This is the delay (in seconds) from the time of the deploy request (when
the swift temporary URL is generated) to when the URL is used for the image
download. You can think of it as roughly the time needed for IPA ramdisk to
startup and begin download. This value is used to check if the swift
temporary URL duration is large enough to let the image download begin. Also
if temporary URL caching is enabled, this will determine if a cached entry
will still be valid when the download starts. It is used only if
``[glance]swift_temp_url_cache_enabled`` is ``True``.
#. Increase ``[glance]swift_temp_url_duration`` option in the ironic conductor
config file, as only non-expired links to images will be returned from the
swift temporary URLs cache. This means that if
``swift_temp_url_duration=1200`` then after 20 minutes a new image will be
cached by the proxy server as the query in its URL will change. The value of
this option must be greater than or equal to
``[glance]swift_temp_url_expected_download_start_delay``.
#. Add one or more of ``image_http_proxy``, ``image_https_proxy``,
``image_no_proxy`` to driver_info properties in each node that will use the
proxy.
Advanced configuration
======================
Out-of-band vs. in-band power off on deploy
-------------------------------------------
After deploying an image onto the node's hard disk, Ironic will reboot
the machine into the new image. By default this power action happens
``in-band``, meaning that the ironic-conductor will instruct the IPA
ramdisk to power itself off.
Some hardware may have a problem with the default approach and
would require Ironic to talk directly to the management controller
to switch the power off and on again. In order to tell Ironic to do
that, you have to update the node's ``driver_info`` field and set the
``deploy_forces_oob_reboot`` parameter with the value of **True**. For
example, the below command sets this configuration in a specific node::
baremetal node set <UUID or name> --driver-info deploy_forces_oob_reboot=True