Since 2012, CERN is running an OpenStack cloud with currently around 300k cores to provide compute resources to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful proton accelerator in the world. To complete the service's offering by provisioning bare metal nodes in addition to virtual machines and containers, we recently started to integrate Ironic into our service deployment.
In this presentation we will go through the integration process as well as the challenges arising from running the bare metal service in an environment managed by multiple teams responsible for different parts of and workflows in the datacenter.
We will also show the benefits of moving everything under a unified OpenStack umbrella from both, the user's as well as the operators' perspective. While provisioning newly arrived hardware and giving access to "exotic" configurations was the primary task, we will also describe our efforts to transparently migrate already deployed servers into this new service.
Attendees can expect to learn:
- our motivation and the benefits to add a bare metal service to a cloud service offering;
- how we integrated Ironic into an existing (cell based) deployment, along with the technical issues;
- how we consolidated existing provisioning workflows and tools;
- how we enrolled pre-Ironic hosts into the service;
- limitations we need to work on.
