How can OneView virtual MAC addresses be used with OpenStack Ironic?

[ricardoas]

When enrolling a new Ironic node corresponding to one OneView-managed Server Hardware an Ironic Port must be associated to this node to make it available for deployment, meaning that all node validations should be passing. One current restriction for Ironic Ports created for Ironic nodes using OneView hardware type is that the MAC address of this port must match the physical MAC address for the port (typically 1.1-a) with PXE boot enabled.

Using a virtual MAC address instead raises some questions: i) can an OpenStack user choose a MAC address for changing a previously created (by the cloud administrator) Ironic Port when launching an instance?; ii) can a MAC address randomly assigned when applying a Server Profile to a Server Hardware be used to update all Ironic/Neutron references to already created ports without failing any validation during the deployment process?

The first question is a problem of feasibility of this scenario in the OpenStack instance launching workflow while the second question is not interesting from the user point of view who wants to reuse the same MAC address in a new deployment for High Availability purposes.

During the Pike PTG there was some discussion starting around HA using Nova migration feature.

Also, there is a "Port Events" specification being implemented that should help changing neutron resources (meaning ports) during the deployment what can lead to an interesting path of modifying the MAC address of an Ironic port if the user can specify that in some way when launching the instance.