Manually allocate IP addresses for bare metal hosts

Available since Cluster releases 16.0.0 and 17.0.0 as TechPreview and since 16.1.0 and 17.1.0 as GA

You can force the DHCP server to assign a particular IP address for a bare metal host during PXE provisioning by adding the host.dnsmasqs.metal3.io/address annotation with the desired IP address value to the required bare metal host.

If you have a limited amount of free and unused IP addresses for a server provisioning, you can manually create bare metal hosts one by one and provision servers in small, manually managed batches.

For batching in small chunks, you can use the host.dnsmasqs.metal3.io/address annotation to manually allocate IP addresses along with the baremetalhost.metal3.io/detached annotation to pause automatic host management by the bare metal Operator.

To pause bare metal hosts for a manual IP allocation during provisioning:

  1. Set the baremetalhost.metal3.io/detached annotation for all bare metal hosts that pauses host management.

    Note

    If the host provisioning has already started or completed, adding of this annotation deletes the information about the host from Ironic without triggering deprovisioning. The bare metal Operator recreates the host in Ironic once you remove the annotation. For details, see Metal3 documentation.

  2. Add the host.dnsmasqs.metal3.io/address annotation with corresponding IP address values to a batch of bare metal hosts.

  3. Remove the baremetalhost.metal3.io/detached annotation from the batch used in the previous step.

  4. Repeat the steps 2 and 3 until all hosts are provisioned.

See also