Wipe a device or partition

Available since 2.26.0 (17.1.0 and 16.1.0)

Before deploying a cluster, you may need to erase existing data from hardware devices to be used for deployment. You can either erase an existing partition or remove all existing partitions from a physical device. For this purpose, use the wipeDevice structure that configures cleanup behavior during configuration of a custom bare metal host profile described in Create a custom host profile.

The wipeDevice structure contains the following options:

  • eraseMetadata

    Configures metadata cleanup of a device

  • eraseDevice

    Configures a complete cleanup of a device

Erase metadata from a device

When you enable the eraseMetadata option, which is disabled by default, the Ansible provisioner attempts to clean up the existing metadata from the target device. Examples of metadata include:

  • Existing file system

  • Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configuration

The behavior of metadata erasure varies depending on the target device:

  • If a device is part of other logical devices, for example, a partition, logical volume, or MD RAID volume, such logical device is disassembled and its file system metadata is erased. On the final erasure step, the file system metadata of the target device is erased as well.

  • If a device is a physical disk, then all its nested partitions along with their nested logical devices, if any, are erased and disassembled. On the final erasure step, all partitions and metadata of the target device are removed.

Caution

None of the eraseMetadata actions include overwriting the target device with data patterns. For this purpose, use the eraseDevice option as described in Erase a device.

To enable the eraseMetadata option, use the wipeDevice field in the spec:devices section of the BareMetalHostProfile object. For a detailed description of the option, see API Reference: BareMetalHostProfile.

Erase a device

If you require not only disassembling of existing logical volumes but also removing of all data ever written to the target device, configure the eraseDevice option, which is disabled by default. This option is not applicable to paritions, LVM, or MD RAID logical volumes because such volumes may use caching that prevents a physical device from being erased properly.

Important

The eraseDevice option does not replace the secure erase.

To configure the eraseDevice option, use the wipeDevice field in the spec:devices section of the BareMetalHostProfile object. For a detailed description of the option, see API Reference: BareMetalHostProfile.