BareMetalHost States

BareMetalHost resources move through a defined set of lifecycle states as vMetal provisions and manages physical servers. See Architecture for how the states fit into the overall provisioning flow.

Modify the following with your specific values to replace them across the whole page:

NAMESPACE

BMH_NAME

Lifecycle states

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Check all servers in a namespace:

kubectl get baremetalhost -n my-metal3-namespace \
-o custom-columns='NAME:.metadata.name,STATE:.status.provisioning.state,ERROR:.status.errorMessage'

Two abbreviations appear throughout: BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) and BMO (Bare Metal Operator). BMC is the server's out-of-band management interface. BMO is the Metal3 provisioning controller.

State	Description	Common failure causes
registering	BMC verification and Ironic registration.	BMC unreachable; wrong BMC address or credentials.
inspecting	Hardware inventory collection by IPA ramdisk.	DHCP server not deployed or unreachable; wrong boot MAC; no DHCP response; IPA ramdisk download failure.
available	Ready to claim.	n/a
provisioning	OS image write and cloud-init configuration.	Image URL unreachable from the server; checksum mismatch; wrong rootDeviceHint.
provisioned	Running the configured OS.	Node join can still fail if cloud-init or networking are misconfigured.
deprovisioning	Disk cleaning before returning to the pool.	Cleaning step times out; BMC unreachable; cleaning ramdisk cannot reach Ironic or DHCP proxy.
error	A failure occurred.	See the status.errorMessage field.

Status fields

For more detail on a specific server:

kubectl describe baremetalhost my-baremetalhost-name -n my-metal3-namespace

Field	Where to find it	What it tells you
Status.Provisioning.State	kubectl describe or kubectl get bmh -o yaml	The current lifecycle state.
Status.ErrorMessage	Status section in describe output	The last error from the BMO or Ironic.
Status.ErrorCount	Status section	How many consecutive errors have occurred. A high count means repeated retries.
Status.GoodCredentials	Status section	Whether BMC credentials have been validated successfully.
Status.HardwareDetails	Status section	Hardware inventory populated after inspecting. Empty here means inspection never completed.
Status.OperationHistory	kubectl get bmh -o yaml	Timestamps for recent inspect and provision operations. An empty end field means the operation is still in progress.