Nova and Horizon allow inappropriate actions to be performed on baremetal nodes

[Kyrylo Romanenko]

Ironic baremetal nodes do not support all variety of operations that nova virtual instances do.

But Nova and Horizon still offers to perform actions with ironic baremetal nodes that can be applied to virtual instances only.

Examples of steps:
root@node-1:~# nova pause NEW1
root@node-1:~# nova suspend NEW1
As result Nova silently accepts commands without any warning or error messages. Same actions can be performed via Horizon with green "Success" popup.
Also see list of actions over baremetal node on screenshot.

One more example:
Backup to image baremetal instance:
root@node-1:~# nova image-create --poll --show NEW1 IMAGENEW1
Server snapshotting... 0% complete

and process stalls showing 0% in console infinitely.
Expected that nova will not try do this with baremetal node at all.

Currently baremetal nodes do not support following actions:

a) Create Snapshot
b) Pause
c) Suspend
d) Migrate
e) Live Migrate
f) Only one kind or reboot should be supported (Hard reboot?)
g) Resize

These actions should be disabled for baremetal machines in Nova and Horizon.
Currently there are no destructive aftermaths detected, therefore this bug affects user by confusing him when using Horizon and Nova.

[Zhenguo Niu (niu-zglinux)]

hi, Is it possible to find hypervisor of instance belongs to? seems there's no extend attrbute like hypervisor_type in instance object.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/215419

[Michael Davies (mrda)]

I'm not going to get to this soon, so unassigning for now

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

Hi! Do you folks expect something to be done at Ironic side? I see it as a problem in Ironic nova driver and/or in Horizon.

[Michael Davies (mrda)]

I think that Ironic can possibly support some of these features (although they may be hardware dependent), but certainly some of these features just cannot apply to hardware.

But certainly for the operations that are not supported, the driver needs to provide a better interface, letting Nova (and hence the user) that the requested operation is not supported.

I'll chase some Ironic people to get some definitive answers on this.

[Jim Rollenhagen (jim-rollenhagen)]

I tend to think this should all be above the Ironic driver; Nova should have a method for returning an error for commands not supported by a given virt driver.

Bonus points for an API in Nova that exposes which methods an instance can do, for Horizon's use.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Related fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/283904

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Change abandoned by David Lyle (<email address hidden>) on branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/215419
Reason: This review is > 4 weeks without comment, and failed Jenkins the last time it was checked. We are abandoning this for now. Feel free to reactivate the review by pressing the restore button and leaving a 'recheck' comment to get fresh test results.

[Tyr Johanson (tyr-6)]

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1625252

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Change abandoned by Michael Still (<email address hidden>) on branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/283904
Reason: Per discussion at the summit (https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-nova-summit-meetup), we are abandoning Newton specs that haven't merged. You may restore this patch and move it to Ocata if you'd like.

[Sean Dague (sdague)]

There are no currently open reviews on this bug, changing the status back to the previous state and unassigning. If there are active reviews related to this bug, please include links in comments.

[Mithun (mithunsunku)]

Change should be added in Nova to reject invalid operations for baremetal servers by making instance type as a mandatory parameter instead of optional to distinguish between the type instances.

[Jay Faulkner (jason-oldos)]

This showed up in Ironic's bug review dashboard.

I don't think this is a valid bug anymore; Ironic is implementing support for more and more of these every day. We have a path forward (using service steps) for implementing snapshotting, if desired. Resize can make sense in some future-world with composable hardware and we support multiple kinds of reboot already (soft and hard).

I disagree with the basic premise that baremetal servers will simply never be able to support some of thse endpoints; over the last ten years we've enabled baremetal servers, through Nova, to do things -- like rescue -- which might have previously been seen as unreasonable to do on bare metal.

From an Ironic standpoint; I would say this bug is invalid. If this is a bug in Nova/Horizon, it should be around exposing hypervisor/instance capabilities, generally, via API -- not about special casing bare metal instances.