Hardware inspection

Inspection is a process of obtaining hardware information from the machine. In the normal case, it runs automatically on enrollment after BMC credentials have been verified. The BareMetalHost is in the inspecting state during inspection and moves to preparing or available state on success.

On failure, inspection is retried until it succeeds or is disabled on the host as described below.

See Ironic inspection documentation for more details about the implementation.

Hardware inventory

After successful inspection, the inventory is retrieved from Ironic and stored as a HardwareData resource with the same name and namespace as the host. The available information will depend on the type of inspection (fast or normal) and on the hardware itself. Check HardwareData API for a list of all possible fields.

WARNING: hardware data is not updated automatically, unless a new inspection is requested as described below.

Fast (out-of-band) inspection

BMO 0.14 introduced a new fast inspection mode for Redfish-based drivers. When this mode is configured, inspection is conducted by reading information from the BMC instead of from the agent running on the machine. Thus, fast inspection can be used to collect information before the host is first booted.

Set inspectionMode to fast to use this feature:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: example
spec:
  inspectionMode: fast
  # ...

WARNING: the GA release 0.14.0 contained severe issues preventing fast inspection from working on many hardware models. Use version 0.14.2 or newer.

NOTE: there are no plans to make fast inspection work with the IPMI driver.

Re-running inspection

The inspect annotation can be used to request the BareMetal Operator to (re-)inspect an available BareMetalHost, for example, when the hardware changes. If an inspection request is made while the host is any other state than available, the request will be ignored.

To request a new inspection, simply annotate the host with inspect.metal3.io. Once inspection is requested, you should see the BMH in inspecting state until inspection is completed, and by the end of inspection the inspect.metal3.io annotation will be removed automatically.

Here is an example:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: example
  annotations:
    # The inspect annotation with no value
    inspect.metal3.io: ""
spec:
  # ...

NOTE: The type of inspection (fast or normal) to re-run is defined by the inspectionMode field. It must not be set to disabled!

Disabling inspection

If you do not need the HardwareData collected by inspection, you can disable it by setting the inspectionMode field to disabled, for example:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: example
spec:
  inspectionMode: disabled
  # ...

For BMO before version 0.12, you need to use the inspect annotation instead:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: example
  annotations:
    inspect.metal3.io: disabled
spec:
  ...

This approach is deprecated and will eventually be removed. In the future, the inspect annotation will be used only for re-running inspection as described above.

See also

For advanced use cases, such as providing externally gathered inspection data, see external inspection.