2.12. Bare Metal Provisioning Service

This section outlines the top new features for the Bare Metal Provisioning (ironic) service.

Graceful Shutdown and NMI: This release provides support for graceful shutdown and nonmaskable interrupts (NMI) for bare metal nodes. Graceful shutdown provides a safe way to power off the bare metal node using the API, which is useful when SSH connectivity is unavailable. NMI assists in accessing the bare metal node for troubleshooting and core dumps.
LLDP Data Extraction: The Bare Metal Provisioning service can now extract LLDP data, including information about the attached switch port, during the inspection of overcloud nodes. The information is extracted by querying the Swift object associated with each node.
VirtualBMC and IPMI: This release introduces the VirtualBMC proxy tool to control virtual machine power for bare metal nodes using the IPMI protocol. You can use this feature with the pxe_ipmitool driver to replace the deprecated pxe_ssh drivers to test bare metal deployments in a virtual environment. VirtualBMC and the pxe_ipmitool allow you to use the same drivers for test and deployment of bare metal nodes.