Is anyone running MAAS?

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AveryFreeman

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Mar 17, 2017
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I've got a vSphere setup, but my hardware keeps getting dropped from the HCL with every upgrade, and there's a ton of super cheap hardware out there I could grab on eBay that would work if I just ran linux + kvm instead. Plus, much better container support...

Is anyone running MAAS? It looks like an easy way to manage new hardware - just adopt it and let 'er rip. The resource management across the cluster looks cool, too. Also, openstack, ceph and SDS charms (I just bought a few adaptec SmartHBA 2100s). It makes it all look sooooo easy...

Anyone moved from VMware to MAAS or another kvm setup? Want to tell me why? Are you happy/sad? Angry? Despondent?
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I had tried MAAS a few years ago in the lab. Our big challenge is that when you review hardware, sometimes before the release date, driver support was causing nodes not to get adopted properly.

If you are buying used on eBay, that is unlikely a concern.
 
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AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
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Near Seattle
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I had tried MAAS a few years ago in the lab. Our big challenge is that when you review hardware, sometimes before the release date, driver support was causing nodes not to get adopted properly.

If you are buying used on eBay, that is unlikely a concern.
Hehe, I am definitely buying used! I usually have the opposite problem - ESXi releases dropping support for my gear ;)

What'd you think of MAAS overall, though?
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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What is the "problem" that you want to solve?
There are lots of free solution.

If you want to manage VM and container , there is Proxomx ( debain with kvm and lxc ).
If you want to manage a bunch of bare metal clients to run ubuntu and debain , there is MAAS.

I have a cluster of HP mini, it is managed by MAAS , the MAAS server is running in a Ubuntu VM.
The Ubuntu VM is running inside Proxmox.

Using Intel AMT Vpro or IPMI, MAAS have control power on / off /reset with each individual bare metal machine.
Deploy OS to each physical host.

MAAS also manage / deploy VM and OS as well.

Give a try, spin up Proxmox , MAAS.

Before I deployed MAAS hardware cluster .
For prototype, I spin up a Ubuntu host with KVM and MAAS to manage / depoly VM,
just to have a feel and see if it fit my usage.
 

AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
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Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com
What is the "problem" that you want to solve?
There are lots of free solution.

If you want to manage VM and container , there is Proxomx ( debain with kvm and lxc ).
If you want to manage a bunch of bare metal clients to run ubuntu and debain , there is MAAS.
Yeah, I was thinking having metal management + software def. storage (e.g. ceph) would make it easier to:
  • take a host down for maintenance
  • replace hosts with different hardware
  • add/remove hosts
plus I think I was reading something about MAAS helping with resource allocation for VMs across hosts (or maybe it was OpenStack and I got confused, it was a while ago).

I have a cluster of HP mini, it is managed by MAAS , the MAAS server is running in a Ubuntu VM.
The Ubuntu VM is running inside Proxmox.

Using Intel AMT Vpro or IPMI, MAAS have control power on / off /reset with each individual bare metal machine.
Deploy OS to each physical host.
Wow, that's really neat. See, that's what I'm talking about - and you can swap in/out machines easily if you want. Are they running ceph?

I have a vPro Thinkpad whose ME firmware disappeared after a few BIOS upgrades, so I'm a little concerned about relying on it for BMC, but if I could get it to work reliably it would be cool to eventually migrate to lower-power hardware. Always looking for ways to reduce carbon footprint...
 

imorhi

New Member
Apr 17, 2018
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I've been using MAAS with a Digital Loggers Inc power strip and 6x HP T730+ConnnectX-3s for testing and evaluating before deploying it for my company for our on prem openstack.

There's a lot to learn if you want to use Juju to deploy bare metal with charmed kubernetes or charmed openstack but if you're only using it to deploy, redeploy, and manage a cluster it works great.

My original use case was to be able to reinstall my cluster whenever I felt like it with either Ubuntu or CentOS with a few clicks then use Ansible to provision all the machines with whatever I was testing at the time whether it was Openstack (Kolla), Elasticsearch, or Kubernetes. For this use case I don't know of a better solution, I had previously used Matchbox as a PXE server but there was no "tracking" (I just had an Ansible playbook to clear the drives and hope they booted to PXE on reboot) on whether the nodes were not installed/installed/ready to be reinstalled which MAAS solves near perfectly.
 
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