Power management of Bare Metal servers with Foreman

Power management of bare-metal servers is a new feature that comes with Foreman 1.2. You will need to have deployed Foreman and smart-proxy to 1.2 to enjoy this.
With that feature you will be able to provide a way to start, stop and reboot servers directly from Foreman’s Webinterface or from REST API.
This has been tested on DELL servers configuring DRAC/

Smart-proxy configuration

On your smart-proxy, you need:

* The rubyipmi gem installed

# gem install rubyipmi

* ipmitool installed:

# apt-get install ipmitool

Configuration in Foreman

You need to edit the host you want to manage with BMC:

• Go on foreman/hosts/server.example.com/edit
• Click on  Network tab
• Click on ‘Add Interface’
• Type = ‘BMC’
• You need then to get the MAC address of your BMC interface. Connect to your server (server.example.com in my example) in ssh and then using ipmitool command :

# ipmitool lan print

Foreman will automaticaly add a DNS record and a DHCP lease for your interface.
However, there is a bug in 1.2.0 where Foreman doesn’t append correctly the domain to the name of the card (see the open bug ). As a woraround, you can set in Name field the FQDN of your interface name (ie: server-ipmi.example.com)

• Eventualy choose a user/password then save.

IPMI configuration

On the server, you still need to configure it to allow Foreman to use it :
You can use the following ipmitool commands :

# ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc dhcp
# ipmitool lan set 1 access on
# ipmitool user set name 3 your_user
# ipmitool user set password 3 your_password
# ipmitool channel setaccess 1 3 callin=on ipmi=on link=on privilege=4
# ipmitool user enable 3

How to use that feature

On the host page, if all went well, you should be able to manage from Foreman the power of the server :

A new feature to integrate more deeply Foreman with all your servers. Foreman is getting better and better !