Is anyone using maas or auto-deploy for vSphere?

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AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
413
54
28
42
Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com
So I'm kind of trying to set up auto-deploy, but not really sure if it's necessary in my case as I only have 3 hosts and will probably need a stateful config due to host inconsistencies.

Is anyone using auto-deploy for a relatively small cluster? If so, how's it working out?

Did you require a stateful deployment that is installed locally, or are you doing stateless deployment via continual pxe boot?

Another option is using MaaS or Foreman for pxe boot, I was thinking of installing one of them - tried MaaS but am having trouble getting a separate network segment set up for the host auto-discovery. I should probably make another thread...
 

AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
413
54
28
42
Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com
If you like PXE, also take a look at FOG Project - which I've not deployed yet, but looks essentially like a PXE-powered Ventoy and potentialy a bit more Homelab-friendly than Foreman.
I don't really "like" pxe necessarily, I just want to investigate automated deployment platforms. For bare metal, actually, MAAS is first on my list, but if I can re-create most its features using VMware stuff, I am running basically all VMware hosts so I might as well use theirs. I saw something I want to say was abbreviated DRM that does bare metal discovery + health monitoring (?) I guess I don't have anything other than supermicro, so there's always ipmiview... And then vRealize lifecycle + vRoPS for the VMs...

Point is, all of them use pxe + dhcp reservations for the BM (and presumably the VMs, but I haven't gotten that far yet, unfortunately). I just finally got my hosts to honor their reservations, apparently you need the MAC from the vmkernel, not the nic...