Manage the lifecycle of bare metal machines

Article
04/30/2024

This article describes how to perform lifecycle management operations on bare metal machines (BMM). These steps should be used for troubleshooting purposes to recover from failures or when taking maintenance actions. The commands to manage the lifecycle of the BMM include:

Caution

Do not perform any action against management servers without first consulting with Microsoft support personnel. Doing so could affect the integrity of the Operator Nexus Cluster.

Power off the BMM
Start the BMM
Restart the BMM
Make the BMM unschedulable (cordon without evacuate)
Make the BMM unschedulable (cordon with evacuate)
Make the BMM schedulable (uncordon)
Reimage the BMM
Replace the BMM

Important

Disruptive command requests against a Kubernetes Control Plane (KCP) node are rejected if there is another disruptive action command already running against another KCP node or if the full KCP is not available. This check is done to maintain the integrity of the Nexus instance and ensure multiple KCP nodes don't go down at once due to simultaneous disruptive actions. If multiple nodes go down, it will break the healthy quorum threshold of the Kubernetes Control Plane.

The bolded actions in the above list are considered disruptive (Power off, Restart, Reimage, Replace). Cordon without evacuate is not considered disruptive. Cordon with evacuate is considered disruptive.

As noted in the cautionary statement, running actions against management servers, especially KCP nodes, should only be done in consultation with Microsoft support personnel.

Prerequisites

Install the latest version of the appropriate CLI extensions.
Get the name of the resource group for the BMM.
Get the name of the bare metal machine that requires a lifecycle management operation.
Ensure that the target bare metal machine poweredState set to On and readyState set to True.
1. This prerequisite isn't applicable for the start command.

Power off the BMM

This command will power-off the specified bareMetalMachineName.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine power-off \
  --name "bareMetalMachineName"  \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

Start the BMM

This command will start the specified bareMetalMachineName.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine start \
  --name "bareMetalMachineName" \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

Restart the BMM

This command will restart the specified bareMetalMachineName.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine restart \
  --name "bareMetalMachineName" \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

Make a BMM unschedulable (cordon)

You can make a BMM unschedulable by executing the cordon command. On the execution of the cordon command, Operator Nexus workloads aren't scheduled on the BMM when cordon is set; any attempt to create a workload on a cordoned BMM results in the workload being set to pending state. Existing workloads continue to run. The cordon command supports an evacuate parameter with the default False value. On executing the cordon command, with the value True for the evacuate parameter, the workloads that are running on the BMM are stopped and the BMM is set to pending state.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine cordon \
  --evacuate "True" \
  --name "bareMetalMachineName" \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

The evacuate "True" removes workloads from that node while evacuate "False" only prevents the scheduling of new workloads.

Make a BMM "schedulable" (uncordon)

You can make a BMM "schedulable" (usable) by executing the uncordon command. All workloads in a pending state on the BMM are restarted when the BMM is uncordoned.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine uncordon \
  --name "bareMetalMachineName" \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

Reimage a BMM

You can restore the runtime version on a BMM by executing the reimage command. This process redeploys the runtime image on the target BMM and executes the steps to rejoin the cluster with the same identifiers. This action doesn't affect the tenant workload files on this BMM. As a best practice, make sure the BMM's workloads are drained using the cordon command, with evacuate "True", before executing the reimage command.

Warning

Running more than one baremetalmachine replace or reimage command at the same time, or running a replace at the same time as a reimage will leave servers in a nonworking state. Make sure one replace/reimage has fully completed before starting another one.

az networkcloud baremetalmachine reimage \
  –-name "bareMetalMachineName"  \
  --resource-group "resourceGroupName"

Replace BMM

Use the replace command when a server encounters hardware issues requiring a complete or partial hardware replacement. After replacement of components such as motherboard or Network Interface Card (NIC) replacement, the MAC address of BMM will change, however the iDRAC IP address and hostname will remain the same.