xcat-core

xCAT/xcat-core

Fork 0

mirror of https://github.com/xcat2/xcat-core.git synced 2024-11-21 09:02:00 +00:00

Table of Contents

Introduction
Basic Idea
Implementation

Baremetal node discovery
Baremetal node registration
Image creation and registration

Packaging

Table of Contents

Introduction
Basic Idea
Implementation
Packaging

Design_Warning

This page is under construction.

Introduction

Baremetal node deployment in OpenStack is not very mature yet. The released nova-baremetal implementation is not good enough to be used in real business world in terms of performance. And it lacks of node discovery, hardware control, firmware updates, sensor readings and monitoring etc. Ironic will replace nova-baremetal in the future for OpenStack, but it will take a while for Ironic to become mature and have all these features. In the meanwhile, some customers demand to have baremetal solution for their OpenStack clouds that is fully functioning. To close this gap, we'll introduce an interim solution, that is using xCAT. The idea is that user will run OpenStack commands to acquire baremetal nodes. Underneath, we'll have OpenStack call xCAT to do the plumbing. To the user, it is seamless. They do not have to know xCAT at all.

This solution will gradually fade away once the Ironic is fully functioning. And there is no plan to contribute this implementation back into OpenStack.

Basic Idea

1. Baremetal node discovery

Once the hardware arrives and networks are setup, the admin can use xCAT's node discovery methods to automatically discovery the node, setup the BMCs and save the mac address, cpu count, memory size and hard disk sizes into xCAT database.

2. Baremetal node registration

The admin can run a command (new) to register the xCAT-discovered nodes as OpenStack baremetal nodes. This command takes an xCAT node range as input and will run nova baremetal-node-crate to register the nodes into OpenStack.

3. OpenStack image registration

The admin will generate the images for the user using xCAT's image generation command "genimage". The admin then runs a command (new) to add xCAT images in to the OpenStack glance database. This command will take an xCAT image name or image group name as input and run glance image-create to register the image. The image will have the xCAT image name as its property.

4. Baremetal node deployment

The tenant will create his/her own subnet and run nova boot with image name to acquire baremetal nodes. A new OpenStack baremetal driver, which is a nova Compute hypervisor driver, will be used in this phase to replace the nova-baremetal driver. The new baremetal driver will get the xCAT image name from the OpenStack image name, it will also get the xCAT node name, the new ip address that is generated by neutron. It then calls xCAT commands to deploy the node. It will also update the OpenStack with node status.

5. Console (tbd)

6. Managing the baremetal nodes

The admin can manage the baremetal nodes using xCAT commands.

rinv -- get hardware inventory.
rvitals -- get hardware vitals.
rcons -- get console
rspconfig -- config node's service processor.
rsetbootseq -- set the boot order.

etc.

Implementation

Baremetal node discovery

xCAT has several node discovery methods. During the node discovery, the nodes mac address, CPU count, memory size and disk sizes will be discovered and saved in the following xCAT tables:

mac
hwinv (new, see [Hardware_Inventory_for_Node_] for details)

The node's BMC ip address, user name and password are saved in the ipmi table. Once nodes are discovered, the node will be assigned a static ip address on the xCAT management network and the DHCP lease will be setup for the node so that it is ready for deployment.

Baremetal node registration

A nova baremetal node registration command takes several node attributes, for example:

 nova baremetal-node-create \
     --pm_address=10.1.0.1 \
     --pm_user=userid \
     --pm_password=password \
     myhost \
     2 4096 286 \
     34:56:78:90:AB:CD

It takes the following attributes as the input:

BMC ip addresss, user id and password
Name of nova compute host which will control this baremetal node
Number of CPUs in the node
Memory in the node (MB)
Local hard disk in the node (GB)
MAC address to provision the node

A new command called opsaddbmnode will pull the above baremetal node information from xCAT tables and call "nova baremetal-node-create" to register the baremetal node with the OpenStack cloud. The syntax of the command is:

 opsaddbmnode &lt;noderange&gt; -s &lt;service_host&gt;
   the _service_host_ is the name of the OpenStack compute host that is hosting the baremetal nodes.
       
 opsaddbmnode[-h|--help]

Please make sure the following xCAT tables are filled with correct information for the given nodes before calling this command.

ipmi (for BMC ip addresss, user id and password)
mac (for MAC address)
hwinv (for CPU, memory and disk info.)

An error will be given if the attributes cannot be found in these xCAT tables.

Image creation and registration

xCAT supports stateless, stateful and statelite images. The admin can help the user create images using the xCAT. Please see Deploying Nodes for details.

A new command called opsaddimage will be used to register the xCAT images into the OpenStack glance tables. The following is the syntax of the command:

  opsaddimage &lt;image1,image2...&gt; [-n &lt;new_name1,new_name2...&gt;] -c &lt;cloud_name&gt;
        The _new_name_ is the OpenStack image name 
        for this image. It defaults to the xCAT image name.
        The _cloud_name_ can be found from the xCAT clouds table.
        
  opsaddimage[-h|--help]

Under the cover the following glance command will be called:

  cd /tmp
  touch my-image.qcow2
  glance image-create --name &lt;xcat_image_name&gt; --public --disk-format qcow2 \
    --container-format bare \
    --property xcat_image_name=&lt;xcat_image_name&gt; &lt;flavor_id&gt; --image &lt;image_name&gt; mynode
     for FLAT network
  
  nova boot --flavor &lt;flavor_id&gt; --image &lt;image_name&gt; --nic net-id=&lt;net_id&gt;
     for per-tenant based network

A nova compute host (node) will be setup. It can be a separate node or on the OpenStack controller node. xCAT will supply a python module that implements the nova.virt.ComputeDriver called xCATBareMetalDriver. The xCATBareMetalDriver will be installed on the compute node and /etc/nova/nova.conf file will be changed to indicate that this special driver will be used for the compute node.

   compute_driver = xcat.openstack.baremetal.driver.xCATBareMetalDriver

xCATBareMetalDriver replaces nova's BaremetalDriver in that it uses xCAT to do the baremetal node deployment. The compute node must have xCAT-client installed in order to call xCAT commands from the xCATBareMetalDriver. xCATBareMetalDriver will implement the a few nova.virt.ComputeDriver interfaces:

spawn:
- From the input parameters, it derives the xCAT image name, xCAT node name.
- It gets the new ip address, subnet and netmask for the node. if the ip given by the OpenStack is in the same subnet as the xCAT management subnet, it will call xCAT command chdef and makehosts to substitue the xCAT's ip with the OpenStack ip for the node in xCAT DB. The node will be booting up using this new IP. Otherwise, the node will be booting up with xCAT's original static ip and a postbootscript will add the OpenStack ip as an alias after the node is up.
- It then calls xCAT command nodeset noename osimage=<imagename> to prepare the tftp and dhcp for the node deployment.
- It adds a postbootscript called config_ops_bmnode.
- It calls xCAT command rpower boot to start the node deployment.
- After the first boot, the config_ops_bmnode postbootscript will configure the baremetal node to have the correct ip and host name.
- It updates the node status for OpenStack.
reboot: It reboot the baremetal node by calling xCAT command rpower boot
destroy:
- It calls xCAT command rpower off to turn the node off.
- It it removes the config_ops_bmnode from the postbootscripts for the node.
- It updates the OpenStack node status.
power_off: It calls xCAT command rpower off.
power_on: It calls xCAT command rpower on.
get_console_output: (tbd)
get_info: It calls xCAT command "rpower stat".

config_ops_bmnode

This is a new xCAT postscript. It takes a hostname, ip(optional), and netmast(optional) as input. It will change the node hostname. If the ip is present, it will add this ip/netmask to the install nic as an alias.

Security

By default, xCAT creates ssh credentials on the nodes so that the nodes can ssh to each other without password as root. For security reasons, especially for the per-tenant network, we'll disable this feature by the site table attribute: site.sshbetweennodes=NOGROUPS. Further study needs to be done to see if remoteshell and other postscripts are needed.

Packaging

All code will be put in xCAT-OpenStack package.

News

Apr 22, 2016: xCAT 2.11.1 released.
Mar 11, 2016: xCAT 2.9.3 (AIX only) released.
Dec 11, 2015: xCAT 2.11 released.
Nov 11, 2015: xCAT 2.9.2 (AIX only) released.
Jul 30, 2015: xCAT 2.10 released.
Jul 30, 2015: xCAT migrates from sourceforge to github
Jun 26, 2015: xCAT 2.7.9 released.
Mar 20, 2015: xCAT 2.9.1 released.
Dec 12, 2014: xCAT 2.9 released.
Sep 5, 2014: xCAT 2.8.5 released.
May 23, 2014: xCAT 2.8.4 released.
Jan 24, 2014: xCAT 2.7.8 released.
Nov 15, 2013: xCAT 2.8.3 released.
Jun 26, 2013: xCAT 2.8.2 released.
May 17, 2013: xCAT 2.7.7 released.
May 10, 2013: xCAT 2.8.1 released.
Feb 28, 2013: xCAT 2.8 released.
Nov 30, 2012: xCAT 2.7.6 released.
Oct 29, 2012: xCAT 2.7.5 released.
Aug 27, 2012: xCAT 2.7.4 released.
Jun 22, 2012: xCAT 2.7.3 released.
May 25, 2012: xCAT 2.7.2 released.
Apr 20, 2012: xCAT 2.7.1 released.
Mar 19, 2012: xCAT 2.7 released.
Mar 15, 2012: xCAT 2.6.11 released.
Jan 23, 2012: xCAT 2.6.10 released.
Nov 15, 2011: xCAT 2.6.9 released.
Sep 30, 2011: xCAT 2.6.8 released.
Aug 26, 2011: xCAT 2.6.6 released.
May 20, 2011: xCAT 2.6 released.
Feb 14, 2011: Watson plays on Jeopardy and is managed by xCAT!
xCAT Release Notes Summary
xCAT OS And Hw Support Matrix
xCAT Test Environment Summary

History

Oct 22, 2010: xCAT 2.5 released.
Apr 30, 2010: xCAT 2.4 is released.
Oct 31, 2009: xCAT 2.3 released.
xCAT's 10 year anniversary!
Apr 16, 2009: xCAT 2.2 released.
Oct 31, 2008: xCAT 2.1 released.
Sep 12, 2008: Support for xCAT 2
can now be purchased!
June 9, 2008: xCAT breaths life into
(at the time) the fastest
supercomputer on the planet
May 30, 2008: xCAT 2.0 for Linux
officially released!
Oct 31, 2007: IBM open sources
xCAT 2.0 to allow collaboration
among all of the xCAT users.
Oct 31, 1999: xCAT 1.0 is born!
xCAT started out as a project in
IBM developed by Egan Ford. It
was quickly adopted by customers
and IBM manufacturing sites to
rapidly deploy clusters.