Bug 1923965 - Clarify BMC Addressing Documentation for Bare Metal IPI Configuration
Summary: Clarify BMC Addressing Documentation for Bare Metal IPI Configuration
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: OpenShift Container Platform
Classification: Red Hat
Component: Documentation
Version: 4.6
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
medium
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
: ---
Assignee: John Wilkins
QA Contact: Lubov
Tomas 'Sheldon' Radej
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2021-02-02 10:35 UTC by Tomas Sedovic
Modified: 2021-05-11 15:57 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
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Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-05-11 15:57:27 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


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Description Tomas Sedovic 2021-02-02 10:35:09 UTC
Document URL: https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.6/installing/installing_bare_metal_ipi/ipi-install-installation-workflow.html#ipi-install-bmc-addressing_ipi-install-configuration-files

Section Number and Name: Configuration Files -> BMC addressing

Describe the issue: 

While using the IPMI or Redfish protocols without virtual media uses the same addressing URL scheme for all hardware (either "ipmi://" or "redfish://"), due to the way Dell implemented the virtual media features, you need to specify "idrac-virtualmedia://" on Dell and "redfish-virtualmedia://" on every other platform.

Using "redfish-virtualmedia" on Dell platforms will not work (and it will not propagate a clear error to the end-user right now, though this is being worked on by the Metal Management team). Confusingly, "idrac-virtualmedia" does actually use the Redfish protocol.


Suggestions for improvement: 

1. Provide a table for the supported hardware vendors with the relevant information. E.g.:


|Vendor | Redfish with Virtual Media| Redfish without Virtual media| IPMI  |
|HPE    | redfish-virtualmedia://   | redfish://                   |ipmi://|
|Dell   | idrac-virtualmedia://     | redfish://                   |ipmi://|

2. Explicitly note that "redfish-virtualmedia" will NOT work on Dell hardware
3. Explicitly note that "idrac-virtualmedia" uses the Redfish standard with Dell's OEM extensions
4. For understanding/debugging purposes we should note that the "redfish://" URL protocol corresponds to the "redfish" hardware type in Ironic and that "idrac-virtualmedia://" to the "idrac" hardware type with the Redfish protocol (as opposed to the "idrac" type with the WSMAN protocol which Ironic also supports, but is not exposed in OpenShift).

Comment 2 Dmitry Tantsur 2021-02-02 10:46:40 UTC
> Explicitly note that "redfish-virtualmedia" will NOT work on Dell hardware

Very explicitly. Maybe with a big red warning.

> Redfish without Virtual media

I'd rather call it "Redfish with network boot" to be more specific.

Comment 4 Lubov 2021-04-20 07:35:09 UTC
Link to 'BMC addressing' doesn't work (3.6.1. Configuring the install-config.yaml file) - there is no such title. 
May be it'll look better if parts "BMC addressing for Dell" and "BMC addressing for HPE" are under title "BMC addressing" like
 
3.6.5 BMC addressing
3.6.5.1 BMC addressing for Dell
3.6.5.2 BMC addressing for HPE

WDYT?

Comment 5 John Wilkins 2021-04-27 21:32:03 UTC
It nests just fine under the upstream docs, with  no numbering. On the downstream docs, the URLs don't show in the TOC. It is just the BMC addressing section. Do you think that's okay?

Comment 6 John Wilkins 2021-04-28 15:53:51 UTC
@Lubov, I've removed the nesting for the downstream docs so that the vendor-specific URLs appear in the TOC. 

Here's is the PR: https://github.com/openshift/openshift-docs/pull/32022

Comment 7 Lubov 2021-04-28 19:12:50 UTC
Looks good now


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