Ironic Standalone Operator

Ironic Standalone Operator (IrSO) is a Kubernetes controller that installs and manages Ironic in a configuration suitable for Metal3. IrSO has the following features:

• Flexible networking configuration, support for Keepalived.
• Using SQLite or MariaDB as the database backend.
• Optional support for a DHCP service (dnsmasq).
• Optional support for automatically downloading an IPA image.

IrSO uses ironic-image under the hood.

Installing Ironic Standalone Operator

On every source code change, a new IrSO image is built and published at quay.io/metal3-io/ironic-standalone-operator. To install it in your cluster, you can use the Kustomize templates provided in the source repository:

git clone https://github.com/metal3-io/ironic-standalone-operator
cd ironic-standalone-operator
git checkout -b <DESIRED BRANCH OR main>

make install deploy
kubectl wait --for=condition=Available --timeout=60s \
  -n ironic-standalone-operator-system deployment/ironic-standalone-operator-controller-manager

API resources

IrSO uses two Custom Resources to manage an Ironic installation:

Ironic manages Ironic itself and all of its auxiliary services.

See installing Ironic with IrSO for information on how to use these resources.

How is Ironic installed?

By default, IrSO installs Ironic as a single pod on a control plane node. This is because Ironic currently requires host networking, and thus it’s not advisable to let it co-exist with tenant workload.

Installed components

An Ironic installation always contains these three components:

• ironic is the main API service, as well as the conductor process that handles actions on bare-metal machines.
• httpd is the web server that serves images and configuration for iPXE and virtual media boot, as well as works as the HTTPS frontend for Ironic.
• ramdisk-logs is a script that unpacks any ramdisk logs and outputs them for consumption via kubectl logs or similar tools.

There is also a standard init container:

• ramdisk-downloader downloads images of the deployment/inspection ramdisk and stores them locally for easy access.

When network boot (iPXE) is enabled, another component is deployed:

• dnsmasq serves DHCP and functions as a PXE server for bootstrapping iPXE.

With Keepalived support enabled:

• keepalived manages the IP address on the provisioning interface.

Supported versions

A major and minor version can be supplied to the Ironic resource to request a specific branch of ironic-image (and thus Ironic). Here are supported version values for each branch and release of the operator:

NOTE: the special version value latest always installs the latest available version of ironic-image and Ironic.