Manually allocate IP addresses for bare metal hosts

Available since 2.25.0 Technology Preview

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 recreate bare metal hosts one by one and provision servers in small, manually managed batches.

For a small batching, 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.

  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 above steps until all hosts are provisioned.

See also