[Starlingx-discuss] Mainteance Redfish feature addition Useability documentation

[MacDonald, Eric]

Starling-X Maintenance now supports the new emerging Redfish(r) Systems Platform Management protocol as an alternative to IPMI for Host Reset, Power Control, Reinstall and Sensor Monitoring.



This is a host level feature that handles mixed BMC access methods of either Redfish or IPMI for different hosts within a full system.



When the system administrator or the deployment manager application provisions a host's BMC, the default maintenance behavior is to issue a Redfish 'Root' query to that host's BMC to determine if it supports Redfish. Receiving a successful query with an acceptable version triggers maintenance to then issue a 'Systems get' command to fetch that host's BMC info. Successful response to both of these requests allows maintenance to continue to use Redfish as the selected board management access method, aka protocol, for that host. A failure to properly respond to either of these requests at all or in a timely manner tells maintenance to instead use the long supported IPMI protocol instead.



The only customer visible change introduced by this feature comes in the form of a new service parameter that allows the system administrator to override the aforementioned the default auto-learning strategy described above. Instead, this new system wide 'platform maintenance' service parameter named 'bmc_access_method' allows the administrator to instruct maintenance to use a specific method. The following method options are supported ...



o          redfish - only use redfish as bmc access method for all hosts in the system

o          ipmi      - only use IPMI as bmc access method for all hosts in the system

o          learn    - for each host, use redfish if supported otherwise use ipmi. Follows behavior described above (default).



> system service-parameter-list | grep -v "auth\|config"



+--------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------------------------+-------+

| uuid                                 | service  | section     | name                        | value |

+--------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------------------------+-------+

| a9945f62-d517-4417-9477-9d27cfb9fb6b | platform | maintenance | bmc_access_method           | learn |

| 7b0e95e1-54b8-4334-a393-8273b3611768 | platform | maintenance | controller_boot_timeout     | 1200  |

| 1d7e5e47-072c-475f-bcb4-656d7008790b | platform | maintenance | heartbeat_degrade_threshold | 6     |

| c51dca15-8806-4c34-9feb-4cf467726d17 | platform | maintenance | heartbeat_failure_action    | fail  |

| 85650684-af0d-4c5f-a323-92991937836c | platform | maintenance | heartbeat_failure_threshold | 10    |

| 9561201a-99c6-4d2b-8f3a-12977a25c6b9 | platform | maintenance | heartbeat_period            | 100   |

| 937eea58-d2e9-4289-806c-23b5bb22f72f | platform | maintenance | mnfa_threshold              | 2     |

| 5822127c-3911-4560-820c-200223e231ad | platform | maintenance | mnfa_timeout                | 0     |

| 30daac52-d6c1-4e1d-9b36-529877387f43 | platform | maintenance | worker_boot_timeout         | 720   |

+--------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------------------------+-------+



This flexibility allows the system administrator to override the default learning behavior that favors redfish over ipmi, with an explicit selection of ipmi or redfish only.

Any failure to establish command based communications with the BMC using the requested method will get retried and if failure persists a bmc access alarm will get raised as it always did with the same alarm definition and ID. There are no new alarms or logs introduced by this update.



The bmc access method can be changed by the following CLI commands



> system service-parameter-modify platform maintenance bmc_access_method=<option>

> system service-parameter-apply platform



Once the 'bmc_access_method' is 'modified' and 'applied' maintenance is automatically informed of the change and then modifies its bmc access method for all the hosts accordingly.



For more information on the Maintenance Redfish Design Specification please refer to the following published feature specification.



https://opendev.org/starlingx/specs/src/branch/master/specs/2019.03/approved/bmc-2005861-add-redfish-support-to-mtce.rst



Cheers,



Eric MacDonald, MTS, Engineering, Wind River

direct 613.963.1387  fax: 613.492.7870  skype: eric.r.macdonald

350 Terry Fox Drive, Suite 200, Kanata, ON K2K 2W5


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