The following diagram shows the possible Provisioning State transitions for the BaremetalHost object:
Newly created hosts move immediately to Discovered or Registering. No host stays in the Created state while the operator is working properly.
An Unmanaged host is missing both the BMC address and credentials secret name, and does not have any information to access the BMC for registration.
An Externally Provisioned host was deployed using another tool and then a host object was created with the externallyProvisioned flag set. Hosts in this state are monitored, and only their power status is managed.
The externallyProvisioned field can also be set to true after inspection is completed (when the host is in Available state). This workflow allows collecting hardware information via BMO's inspection process before handing off provisioning to an external tool (e.g., Image-based Installer for O-RAN deployments).
When using externallyProvisioned hosts in environments with CAPM3, ensure that these hosts are labeled appropriately so that CAPM3's host selector can distinguish them from hosts managed by CAPM3. This prevents CAPM3 from attempting to claim hosts that are managed by external provisioners.
The host will stay in the Registering state while the BMC access details are being validated.
After the host is registered, an agent image will be booted on it using a ramdisk. The agent collects information about the available hardware components, and this process is called "inspection." The host will stay in the Inspecting state until this process is completed.
When setting up RAID, BIOS and other similar configurations, the host will be in Preparing state. For ironic provisioner, we build and set up manual clean steps in Preparing state.
A host in the Available state is available to be provisioned. In older versions of the baremetal-operator, this state was called Ready.
While an image is being copied to the host and it is being configured to run the image the host will be in the Provisioning state.
After an image is copied to the host and the host is running the image, it will be in the Provisioned state.
When the previously provisioned image is being removed from the host, it will be in the Deprovisioning state.
If an error occurs during one of the processing states (Registering, Inspecting, Provisioning, Deprovisioning) the host will enter the Error state.
When the host is marked to be deleted, it will move from its current state to Deleting, at which point the resource record is deleted from kubernetes.