Bare Metal — Ironic

Ironic is the OpenStack Bare Metal provisioning service. It manages the lifecycle of physical servers — enrolling them, inspecting their hardware, deploying operating system images to them, and returning them to an available pool when tenants are done. Ironic integrates with Nova (so openstack server create can target a bare metal node), Neutron (for network provisioning), and Glance (for OS images). Hardware is managed through a pluggable driver model supporting IPMI, Redfish, iDRAC, iLO, and others.

When to Read This Skill

• Enrolling physical servers (nodes) into Ironic
• Configuring IPMI or Redfish credentials for power and management control
• Understanding and navigating the provisioning state machine
• Deploying OS images to bare metal using PXE/iPXE or Redfish virtual media
• Running hardware inspection on enrolled nodes
• Configuring automated or manual cleaning between deployments
• Setting up BIOS and RAID configurations via Ironic
• Integrating Ironic with Nova for tenant-facing bare metal instances
• Troubleshooting failed deployments and understanding IPA (Ironic Python Agent)
• Managing ports, port groups, and Neutron network attachment for bare metal

Sub-Files

File	What It Covers
architecture.md	ironic-api, ironic-conductor; hardware types and driver interfaces; provisioning state machine; cleaning and inspection; Nova/Neutron/Glance integration
operations.md	CLI: node enrollment, port management, power control, provisioning (manage/provide/deploy/undeploy), inspection, BIOS config, RAID config, cleaning
internals.md	Driver composition model; conductor hash ring; deploy steps and clean steps; IPA (Ironic Python Agent) lifecycle; full provisioning state machine with all transitions

Quick Reference

# Enroll a node with IPMI
openstack baremetal node create \
  --driver ipmi \
  --driver-info ipmi_address=10.0.0.50 \
  --driver-info ipmi_username=admin \
  --driver-info ipmi_password=password \
  --name compute-01

# Add a port (MAC address for PXE)
openstack baremetal port create \
  --node compute-01 \
  aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

# Move through the enrollment state machine
openstack baremetal node manage compute-01
openstack baremetal node provide compute-01

# Trigger hardware inspection
openstack baremetal node inspect compute-01

# Deploy an OS image
openstack baremetal node deploy compute-01

# Power operations
openstack baremetal node power on compute-01
openstack baremetal node power off compute-01

# Check node status
openstack baremetal node show compute-01

Dependencies

Dependency	Purpose	Notes
Keystone	Authentication and service catalog	All Ironic API calls use Keystone tokens
Nova	Manages bare metal instances as Nova servers; schedules via resource providers	nova-compute with ironic virt driver on conductor hosts
Neutron	Provisions network ports for bare metal nodes during deploy/undeploy	Required for tenant VLAN isolation; baremetal ML2 mechanism driver
Glance	Stores OS images for deployment	Supports raw, qcow2, and whole-disk images
Swift / RadosGW	Temporary image storage during direct deploy	Required when agents download from object store
DHCP / TFTP / HTTP	PXE/iPXE boot infrastructure	Provided by ironic-conductor or an external service
python-openstackclient	Unified CLI (openstack baremetal …)	Wraps the Ironic v1 REST API
python-ironicclient	Python bindings	Used by Nova's Ironic virt driver and automation

Releases Covered

This skill covers OpenStack 2025.1 (Epoxy), 2025.2, and 2026.1.

Ironic release notes: https://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/ironic/