Advanced Profile Matching

Profile matching allows a user to specify precisely which nodes will receive which flavor. Here are additional setup steps to take advantage of the profile matching. In this document “profile” is a capability that is assigned to both ironic node and nova flavor to create a link between them.

Default profile flavors compute, control, swift-storage, ceph-storage and block-storage are created when the undercloud is installed, and they are usable without modification in most environments.

After profile is assigned to a flavor, nova will only deploy it on ironic nodes with the same profile. Deployment will fail if not enough ironic nodes are tagged with a profile.

There are two ways to assign a profile to a node. You can assign it directly or specify one or many suitable profiles for the deployment command to choose from. It can be done either manually or using the introspection rules.

Manual profile tagging

To assign a profile to a node directly, issue the following command:

openstack baremetal node set <UUID OR NAME> --property capabilities=profile:<PROFILE>

Alternatively, you can provide a number of profiles as capabilities in form of <PROFILE>_profile:1, which later can be automatically converted to one assigned profile (see Use the flavors to deploy for details). For example:

openstack baremetal node set <UUID OR NAME> --property capabilities=compute_profile:1,control_profile:1

Finally, to clean all profile information from a node use:

openstack baremetal node unset <UUID OR NAME> --property capabilities

Note

We can not update only a single key from the capabilities dictionary, so if it contained more then just the profile information then this will need to be set for the node.

Also see instackenv.json for details on how to set profile in the instackenv.json file.

Automated profile tagging

Introspection rules can be used to conduct automatic profile assignment based on data received from the introspection ramdisk. A set of introspection rules should be created before introspection that either set profile or <PROFILE>_profile capabilities on a node.

The exact structure of data received from the ramdisk depends on both ramdisk implementation and enabled plugins, and on enabled ironic-inspector processing hooks. The most basic properties are cpus, cpu_arch, local_gb and memory_mb, which represent CPU number, architecture, local hard drive size in GiB and RAM size in MiB. See Accessing Introspection Data for more details on what our current ramdisk provides.

Create a JSON file, for example rules.json, with the introspection rules to apply (see Examples of introspection rules). Before the introspection load this file into ironic-inspector:

openstack baremetal introspection rule import /path/to/rules.json

Then (re)start the introspection. Check assigned profiles or possible profiles using command:

openstack overcloud profiles list

If you’ve made a mistake in introspection rules, you can delete them all:

openstack baremetal introspection rule purge

Then reupload the updated rules file and restart introspection.

Note

When you use introspection rules to assign the profile capability, it will always override the existing value. On the contrary, <PROFILE>_profile capabilities are ignored for nodes with the existing profile capability.

Use the flavors to deploy

By default, all nodes are deployed to the baremetal flavor. To use profile matching you have to Create flavors to use profile matching first, then use specific flavors for deployment. For each node role set --ROLE-flavor to the name of the flavor and --ROLE-scale to the number of nodes you want to end up with for this role.

After profiles and possible profiles are tagged either manually or during the introspection, we need to turn possible profiles into an appropriate number of profiles and validate the result. Continuing with the example with only control and compute profiles:

openstack overcloud profiles match --control-flavor control --control-scale 1 --compute-flavor compute --compute-scale 1

• This command first tries to find enough nodes with profile capability.

• If there are not enough such nodes, it then looks at available nodes with PROFILE_profile capabilities. If enough of such nodes is found, then their profile capabilities are updated to make the choice permanent.

This command should exit without errors (and optionally without warnings).

You can see the resulting profiles in the node list provided by

$ openstack overcloud profiles list
+--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| Node UUID                            | Node Name | Provision State | Current Profile | Possible Profiles |
+--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| 581c0aca-64f0-48a8-9881-bba3c2882d6a |           | available       | control         | compute, control  |
| ace8ae8d-d18f-4122-b6cf-e8418c7bb04b |           | available       | compute         | compute, control  |
+--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+-----------------+-------------------+

Make sure to provide the same arguments for deployment later on:

openstack overcloud deploy --control-flavor control --control-scale 1 --compute-flavor compute --compute-scale 1 --templates

Examples of introspection rules

Example 1

Imagine we have the following hardware: with disk sizes > 1 TiB for object storage and with smaller disks for compute and controller nodes. We also need to make sure that no hardware with seriously insufficient properties gets to the fleet at all.

[
    {
        "description": "Fail introspection for unexpected nodes",
        "conditions": [
            {"op": "lt", "field": "memory_mb", "value": 4096}
        ],
        "actions": [
            {"action": "fail", "message": "Memory too low, expected at least 4 GiB"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "description": "Assign profile for object storage",
        "conditions": [
            {"op": "ge", "field": "local_gb", "value": 1024}
        ],
        "actions": [
            {"action": "set-capability", "name": "profile", "value": "swift-storage"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "description": "Assign possible profiles for compute and controller",
        "conditions": [
            {"op": "lt", "field": "local_gb", "value": 1024},
            {"op": "ge", "field": "local_gb", "value": 40}
        ],
        "actions": [
            {"action": "set-capability", "name": "compute_profile", "value": "1"},
            {"action": "set-capability", "name": "control_profile", "value": "1"},
            {"action": "set-capability", "name": "profile", "value": null}
        ]
    }
]

This example consists of 3 rules:

1. Fail introspection if memory is lower is 4096 MiB. Such rules can be applied to exclude nodes that should not become part of your cloud.

2. Nodes with hard drive size 1 TiB and bigger are assigned the swift-storage profile unconditionally.

3. Nodes with hard drive less than 1 TiB but more than 40 GiB can be either compute or control nodes. So we assign two capabilities compute_profile and control_profile, so that the openstack overcloud profiles match command can later make the final choice. For that to work, we remove the existing profile capability, otherwise it will have priority.

4. Other nodes are not changed.

Create flavors to use profile matching

In most environment the pre-created profile flavors should be enough for use with profile matching. However, if custom profile flavors are needed, they can be created as follows.

• Create a flavor:

  openstack flavor create --id auto --ram 4096 --disk 40 --vcpus 1 my-flavor
  

  Note

  The values for ram, disk, and vcpus should be set to a minimal lower bound, as Nova will still check that the Ironic nodes have at least this much.

• In order to use the profile assigned to the Ironic nodes, the Nova flavor needs to have the property capabilities:profile set to the intended profile:

  openstack flavor set --property "cpu_arch"="x86_64" --property "capabilities:profile"="my-profile" my-flavor
  

  Note

  The flavor name does not have to match the profile name, although it’s highly recommended.