2.3. Bare Metal Service

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

L3 Routed Spine/Leaf Network Topology: With spine/leaf, the bare metal network now uses layer 3 routing. This new topology makes full use of connections through equal-cost multipathing (ECMP). You can use the new topology only with the Compute and Ceph storage roles. It is not yet possible to use this routing for the provisioning network.
Node Auto-Discovery: Previously, writing an instack.json file was the only way to add overcloud nodes in bulk. The Bare Metal Service can now discover unidentified nodes automatically, without an instack.json file.
Redfish Support: The Redfish API is an open standard for the management of hardware. The Bare Metal service now includes the Redfish API driver. To manage servers compliant with the Redfish protocol, set the driver property to redfish.
Whole-disk Overcloud image support: The Bare Metal Service now supports whole-disk images for the overcloud. Previously, initrd and vmlinuz images were required in addition to the qcow2 image. Now, the Bare Metal Service can accept a single qcow2 image upload as a full disk image. You must build the whole-disk image before you deploy it.