Automated Cleaning

One of the Ironic’s feature exposed to Metal3 Baremetal Operator is node automated cleaning. When enabled, automated cleaning kicks off when a node is provisioned first time and on every deprovisioning.

There are two automated cleaning modes available which can be configured via automatedCleaningMode field of a BareMetalHost spec:

• metadata (the default) enables the removal of partitioning tables from all disks
• disabled disables the cleaning process

For example:

apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
kind: BareMetalHost
metadata:
  name: example-host
spec:
  automatedCleaningMode: metadata
  bootMACAddress: 00:8a:b6:8e:ac:b8
  bmc:
    address: ipmi://192.168.111.1:6230
    credentialsName: example-node-bmc-secret
  online: true

Note: Ironic supports full data removal, which is not currently exposed in Metal3.

For a host with cleaning disabled, no cleaning will be performed during deprovisioning. This is faster but may cause conflicts on subsequent provisionings (e.g. Ceph is known not to tolerate stale data partitions).

Warning: when disabling cleaning, consider setting root device hints to specify the exact block device to install to. Otherwise, subsequent provisionings may end up with different root devices, potentially causing incorrect configuration because of duplicated config drives.

If you are using Cluster-api-provider-metal3, please see its cleaning documentation.