Adopting Externally Provisioned Hosts

BareMetal Operator allows enrolling hosts that have been previously provisioned by a 3rd party without making them go through inspection, cleaning and re-provisioning. Hosts are enrolled as usual, additionally setting the externallyProvisioned field to true:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: host-0
  namespace: my-cluster
spec:
  online: true
  bootMACAddress: 80:c1:6e:7a:e8:10
  bmc:
    address: ipmi://192.168.1.13
    credentialsName: host-0-bmc
  externallyProvisioned: true

Such hosts move from the registering provisioning state directly into externally provisioned as shows in the state machine:

status:
  # ...
  operationalStatus: OK
  provisioning:
    ID: 8799e0d2-d2ca-4681-9385-e8bd69f6f441
    bootMode: UEFI
    image:
      url: ""
    state: externally provisioned

Note: while it’s currently not possible to get a host out of the externally provisioned state, it’s better to future-proof your hosts by adding a real image field so that your externally provisioned hosts look exactly like normal ones.

Available actions

Currently, only a limited set of actions is possible on externally provisioned hosts:

• Powering on and off using the online field.
• Rebooting using the reboot annotation.
• Live updates (servicing).
• Deletion without cleaning (the host is only powered off).

Warning: changing the externallyProvisioned field back to false is currently not supported (see the tracker bug).