Huawei FusionSphere 5.

1
Technical White Paper on
Physical Bare-Metal Server

Issue V1.0

Release Date 2015-04-05

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

 Copyright © Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 2015. All rights reserved.
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About This Document

Overview
This document describes the FusionSphere physical bare-metal server technology.

Intended Audience
This document is intended for Huawei marketing and sales engineers, as well as FusionSphere
distributors in their market development projects.

Symbol Conventions
The symbols that may be found in this document are defined as follows.

Symbol Description
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avoided, could result in death or serious injury.

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avoided, may result in minor or moderate injury.

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avoided, could result in equipment damage, data loss,
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NOTICE is used to address practices not related to personal
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tips.
NOTE is used to address information not related to personal
injury, equipment damage, and environment deterioration.

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Huawei FusionSphere 5.1
Technical White Paper on Physical Bare-Metal Server About This Document

Change History
Changes between document issues are cumulative. The latest document issue contains all the
changes made in earlier issues.

Issue V1.0 (2015-04-05)

This issue is the first official release.

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 Huawei FusionSphere 5.1
Technical White Paper on Physical Bare-Metal Server Contents

Contents

About This Document .................................................................................................................... ii

1 Overview on Physical Bare-Metal Servers ............................................................................... 1
1.1 Background ................................................................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Introduction to Physical Bare-Metal Server Management ............................................................................................ 1

2 Introduction to the Huawei Physical Bare-Metal Server Management Solution ............. 3

2.1 Solution Overview ........................................................................................................................................................ 3
2.2 Solution Architecture .................................................................................................................................................... 3
2.3 Solution Features .......................................................................................................................................................... 4

3 Physical Bare-Metal Server Configuration Management ..................................................... 5

3.1 Preparations .................................................................................................................................................................. 5
3.2 Physical Resource Pool Configuration ......................................................................................................................... 5
3.3 Physical Bare-Metal Server Provisioning ..................................................................................................................... 5

4 Physical Bare-Metal Server Application Scenarios ................................................................ 7

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Technical White Paper on Physical Bare-Metal Server 1 Overview on Physical Bare-Metal Servers

1 Overview on Physical Bare-Metal Servers

1.1 Background
In OpenStack scenario, pure virtualization cannot fully meet users' requirements. Physical
servers are demanded in scenarios that require high performance or need to use physical
hardware or interfaces.
Physical bare-metal servers provide a new mode of using physical servers, which allows you
to:
 Use OpenStack VM interfaces to provision physical bare-metal servers.
 Use OpenStack Nova interfaces to create a bare-metal server image with specified
specifications, and query, modify, start, stop, and restart a physical bare-metal server.
 Attach a Cinder-created volume to a physical bare-metal server using the interfaces for
attaching a volume to a VM.
 Create a virtual port on a physical bare-metal server to connect Neutron VLAN or
VXLAN networks for communicating with VMs.

1.2 Introduction to Physical Bare-Metal Server

Management
Physical bare-metal server management supports the following functions:
 IPMI-based Out-of-Band Management
Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) allows the system to smartly monitor and
control a large number of servers that use different operating systems (OSs), firmware, or
hardware platforms, and also to automatically report the running status of the monitored
servers.
IPMI interfaces communicate with servers using the servers' BMC port IP addresses and are
authenticated using the configured user name and password. IPMI interfaces can be used to
power on, power off, and hard restart a physical bare-metal server, as well as to change the
booting mode of a physical bare-metal server.
 Image Installation
Use an image conversion tool to embed the management agent software required by the
physical bare-metal server into the VM image and upload the generated physical bare-metal

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server image to the glance image server. When provisioning the physical bare-metal server,
Ironic-conductor downloads the physical bare-metal server image from the glance image
server and automatically registers the image as physical bare-metal server's OS.
The physical bare-metal server management function also supports the change of a bare-metal
server's boot option to preboot execution environment (PXE). After you power on the server,
the system loads a miniOS and then executes the installation scripts to download the needed
basic OS to the server and decompress the OS in a disk partition on the server. After
decompressing the OS, the system informs Ironic-conductor to change the physical bare-metal
server's boot option to local boot. The new boot takes effect after the physical bare-metal
server is restarted.
 Life Cycle Management
To make multiple physical bare-metal servers available for life cycle management, register
them in the Ironic database to form a physical bare-metal server resource pool. Then you can
use Nova interfaces to create, delete, query, modify, start, or stop a server in the pool. The
server image and specifications can be specified during creation, and Nova scheduler is
responsible for scheduling and filtering the required servers.
 Automatic Storage Attaching
After a physical bare-metal server starts, the management agent built in the physical
bare-metal server can automatically attach a volume to or detach a volume from the server.
 Connection to a Virtual Network
The built-in OVS and management agent in a physical bare-metal server can query, discover,
and configure the virtual networks that the bare-metal server can connect to, and can connect
the bare-metal server to the VLAN and VXLAN created by Neutron.

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Technical White Paper on Physical Bare-Metal Server Management Solution

2 Introduction to the Huawei Physical

Bare-Metal Server Management Solution

2.1 Solution Overview

In FusionSphere 5.1, the physical bare-metal server feature is independent from the VM
feature, but the interface for creating a physical bare-metal server is the same as that for
creating a VM. When provisioning physical bare-metal servers, you need to specify an
availability zone (AZ) or host group different from what is used by VMs.
FusionSphere 5.1 provides the same virtual network and virtual storage functions for physical
bare-metal servers as what are provided for VMs. Physical bare-metal servers can have a
volume attached or connect to a VXLAN network in the same manner as a VM does.

2.2 Solution Architecture

Figure 2-1 shows the architecture of the Huawei physical bare-metal server management
solution.

Figure 2-1 Huawei physical bare-metal server management solution architecture

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1. The importance of Ironic in OpenStack is similar to Nova compute driver. Ironic consists
of Nova compute driver (Ironic driver), Ironic-api, Ironic-conductor, and Ironic-agent
processes.
2. When provisioning physical bare-metal servers, Nova sends the requests to the supported
Nova compute node by the specified AZ or host group.
3. Nova compute (Ironic driver) performs the required operations, such as downloading the
bare-metal server image, attaching a volume to the server, and creating ports on it. Nova
compute (Ironic driver) invokes the Ironic-api process to power on or off a physical
bare-metal server or to change the server's boot mode.
4. After receiving an operation request, Ironic-api invokes the Ironic-conductor interface to
carry out the required operation using IPMI, for example, power on or off a server,
restart a server, change the server's boot mode, and install an OS for the server in PXE
mode.
5. Ironic-conductor invokes the CPS interfaces to install an OS on a physical bare-metal
server. After the OS is installed, the built-in management agent and OVS in the server
run to issue and configure storage and network settings for the server.

2.3 Solution Features

1. The solution supports provisioning of VMs and physical bare-metal servers using the
same interface but specifying different AZs or host group for them.
2. Physical bare-metal servers also use Nova interfaces to have a Cinder-created volume
automatically attached or detached.
3. Physical bare-metal servers can also connect to a virtual network (flat, VLAN, or
VXLAN) and communicate with VMs.

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3 Physical Bare-Metal Server Configuration

Management

3.1 Preparations
Before provisioning physical bare-metal servers, perform the following operations:
 Configure an IPMI network plane for OpenStack control nodes to ensure that the control
nodes are connected to the BMC plane of the to-be managed physical bare-metal server
and that the control nodes are allowed to control the server's power status and boot mode
using IPMI.
 Change the boot mode of all physical bare-metal servers to once PXE, and then power on
the servers to make CPS automatically discover them. This process is the same as the
common server installation process.

3.2 Physical Resource Pool Configuration

Configure a physical bare-metal server resource pool and register the servers in Ironic,
because Ironic can only control registered physical bare-metal servers.
 Open the web user interface (web UI) and query the hosts that are automatically
discovered by CPS. Search for the servers to be added as physical bare-metal servers
from the host list according to the IPMI IP addresses, and set the servers' roles to
bare-metal server.
 On the local FusionManager web portal, find out the servers to be configured as physical
bare-metal servers, and enter the IPMI interface username and password to register them
as physical bare-metal servers in Ironic.

3.3 Physical Bare-Metal Server Provisioning

Physical bare-metal servers are provisioned using Nova interfaces. Only the bare-metal
servers that have been registered in Ironic can be provisioned, and provisioned bare-metal
servers cannot be provisioned again.
The process for provisioning physical bare-metal servers is as follows:

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 Select a VM's qcow2 image and convert the image to a physical bare-metal server image
using an image-making tool in the Linux environment.
 Import the physical bare-metal server image to Glance and register it as a physical
bare-metal server image.
 On Service Center (SC), select the registered physical bare-metal server image and use
the specified physical bare-metal server flavor to create physical bare-metal servers by
invoking Nova interfaces. During the creation process, you can specify the network the
physical bare-metal servers are to be connected.
 Ironic-conductor downloads the physical bare-metal server image, registers it in the
software repository, and changes the bare-metal server boot mode to PXE. After
restarting the physical bare-metal servers, Ironic-conductor PXE-installs the OS
specified in the image for the bare-metal servers.
 Ironic-conductor regularly queries the image installation progress. After the image is
installed, Ironic-conductor restarts the physical bare-metal servers and changes the
physical bare-metal servers' deployment status on Ironic, and then notifies Nova that the
image installation is complete.
 After the physical bare-metal servers are restarted, their built-in management agents run
to obtain network configurations and create virtual network devices for the bare-metal
servers to automatically connect to VLAN or VXLAN.

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Technical White Paper on Physical Bare-Metal Server 4 Physical Bare-Metal Server Application Scenarios

4 Physical Bare-Metal Server Application

Scenarios

Physical bare-metal servers apply to the following scenarios:

 Database application requiring high performance
Physical bare-metal servers can be attached with a shared storage device to meet requirements
of such cluster database as Oracle RAC.
 Provisioning of dedicated hardware servers
Some hardware devices that cannot use VM-based passthrough functions can have access to
hardware devices of an exclusive physical bare-metal server.

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