Ironic consists of an API and plug-ins for managing and provisioning physical machines in a security-aware and fault-tolerant manner. It can be used with nova as a hypervisor driver, or standalone service.
By default, it will use PXE and IPMI/Redfish to interact with bare metal machines. Some drivers, like the Redfish drivers, also support advanced features like leveraging HTTPBoot or Virtual Media based boot operations depending on the configuration by the user. Ironic also supports vendor-specific plug-ins which may implement additional functionality, however many vendors have chosen to focus on their Redfish implementations instead of customized drivers.
Numerous ways exist to leverage Ironic to deploy a bare metal node, above and beyond asking Nova for a "bare metal" instance, or for asking Ironic to manually deploy a specific machine. Bifrost and Metal3 are related projects which seek to simplify the use and interaction of Ironic.
Ironic is distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. The full terms and conditions of this license are detailed in the LICENSE file.
- Documentation: https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest
- Source: https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic
- Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bugs
- APIs: https://docs.openstack.org/api-ref/baremetal/index.html
- Release Notes: https://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/ironic/
- Design Specifications: https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/ironic-specs/
Project status, bugs, and requests for feature enhancements (RFEs) are tracked in Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ironic
For information on how to contribute to ironic, see https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/contributor