SystemsRedfishPy

Cross platform Python tool for provisioning and managing storage systems using the RESTful Redfish/Swordfish API.

Copyright (c) 2019 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved

Introduction

SystemsRedfishPy is a command line tool that implements the client side of the Redfish RESTful API for Storage System Management.

Source code files of the SystemsRedfishPy open source project are available to you under The MIT License. The SystemsRedfishPy project repository is maintained at https://github.com/Seagate.

Redfish is the new RESTful API for hardware management defined by the DMTF Scalable Platform Management Forum (SPMF). It provides a modern, secure, multi-node, extendable interface for hardware management. Swordfish authored by SNIA provides extensions for handling storage specific provisioning and management.

SystemsRedfishPy goes beyond common HTTP tools such as curl to provide quick and easy storage management and storage volume creation. This tool provides simple one-step commands handling multiple Redfish URI requests in order to carry out storage management. The main features of this package are:

• Command line or script file execution
• Set up is a breeze and configuration settings are modified with a bang (!setting <value>)
• Add new configuration variables via a single line with easy access routines
• Handles multiple command sets for various product brands - !brand <product> to switch between command sets
• Drop in new commands to increase desired functionality - with no modifications to the infrastructure
• Help text built in to each command file
• Built in unittest for quick regression testing of a Redfish service
• Debug logging and tracing built in for command line usage or unit test cases
• Class modules to simplify working with URIs and JSON data

Background

Seagate Systems (Enterprise Data Solutions (EDS)) provides a Redfish/Swordfish Service that was first released in 2019. This new service was first featured on the Seagate Indium product line. This package provides a reference client that can be used on any computer with Python installed. This reference client enables you to perform configuration and maintenance operations on a storage controller using the Redfish/Swordfish API.

The Redfish API is a standard REST API maintained by DMTF Redfish. The Swordfish API is an extension to the Redfish API maintained by SNIA Swordfish.

Why SystemsRedfishPy?

1. SystemsRedfishPy was originally written during the development of the Redfish storage service, helpful for validating storage service operations and to quickly and easily display JSON data from various URIs.
2. SystemsRedfishPy was extended to provide test cases to quickly validate and report on the status of the current Redfish service version.
3. SystemsRedfishPy provides an example implementation for how a client can execute common storage management functions like create a RAID disk group, create a storage pool, create a storage volume, and map that volume to a host computer.
4. SystemsRedfishPy can also be called from other scripts, used as a command line tool, or execute scripts to quickly provision storage or check on the health of a storage system.

Installation

This project is maintained under GitHub SystemsRedfishPy.

The process to use this client is to clone a copy of the project to your local hard drive.

Clone the project

cd base_directory
git clone SystemsRedfishPy.git
cd SystemsRedfishPy
python3 redfishAPI.py

Requirements

Your client computer must have Python3 installed. You will also need network access to the desired controller, and know the IP Address of the target controller running the Redfish Service. User credentials are required in order to create a Redfish sessions and provision storage.

Using SystemsRedfishPy does not rely on any other packages. But HTML and XML packages are used if you desire to run unit test cases. See the test document for more information.

Quick Tutorial

This client can run in either an interactive mode, or by parsing a script file. This quick tutorial demonstrates the interactive mode. All commands entered at the prompt can also be pasted into a text file and run as a script.

Open a terminal window and change directories to the SystemsRedfishPy folder. Run the command 'python redfishAPI.py' and you will be presented with a '(redfish)' prompt.

>python redfishAPI.py

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1.0] Redfish API
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[] Run Redfish API commands interactively...

(redfish)

There are four main categories of commands that can be entered.

Help

help - provides a list of available commands help [command name] - provides details on a command

Configuration Commands

There are several configuration commands useful to set up communications and tracing.

To configure which controller to talk to:

When running commands, you have several options to help debug issues, and to configure the system:

Redfish Commands

Most commands require that you establish a session with the target Redfish Service. To do so, use 'create session'. This command will use the configuration settings, listed above, such as mcip, username, and password and attempt to establish a session.

(redfish) create session

++ Establish Redfish session: (/redfish/v1/SessionService/Sessions)...
[] Redfish session established (key=8356051e862ca5de23bc2850a3903ad6)

[] Elapsed time: 0m 1s to execute command

The main redfish commands are used for debugging or learning more about the data returned by the Redfish Service.

For example:

Systems Commands

The system commands use the Redfish Service API to create volumes, display disks, and other configuration and maintenance items.

For example:

(redfish) show disks - will display all disk drives in the system
(redfish) show pools - will display all configured virtual pools
(redfish) show volumes - will display all configured volumes
(redfish) create diskgroup name=dgA01 disks=0.7,0.8 pool=A level=raid1 - to create a new RAID1 disk group
(redfish) create volume name=TestVol01 size=100000000000 pool=A - to create a new volume

Design

If you want to make changes to this reference client, there is a design document that provides an overview of how to make changes and add new commands. The main system design allows you to add commands, and help for commands, without having to change any of the underlying core files. The only step needed is to add your new command to the 'commands' folder using the prescribed template.

Unit Testing

If you want to run unit testing, the unit test document provides an overview of how to install the reporting packages, run unit tests, and also add new unit tests.