Create a Virtual MAAS Test Environment

Development
1

Setting up a “Virtual MAAS” Test Environment

It can be useful to setup MAAS with KVM for testing and evaluation. This guide will walk you through the process of doing this.

Prerequisites

$ sudo apt install libvirt-bin qemu-kvm cpu-checker
$ sudo snap install lxd

Verify KVM hardware acceleration is available on your local machine.

$ kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

Create a LXC Container with KVM

Create a LXC profile that we can reuse in the future if needed. This profile
enables KVM hardware acceleration in the container and installs libvirt in the container.

$ lxc profile create kvm
$ cat <<EOF | lxc profile edit kvm
config:
    user.user-data: |
        #cloud-config
        package_upgrade: true
        packages: [libvirt-bin, qemu-kvm, cpu-checker, libvirt-clients, jq]
        runcmd:
        - cat /dev/zero | ssh-keygen -q -N ""
        - cat /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
description: Provide access to /dev/kvm in the container, for hardware accelleration
devices:
kvm:
    gid: "1001"
    major: "10"
    minor: "232"
    path: /dev/kvm
    type: unix-char
name: kvm
used_by: []
EOF

Now we have created the profile we can launch an instance with it and wait for
the cloud-config to complete.

$ lxc launch ubuntu:bionic bionic-maas-kvm -p default -p kvm
$ lxc exec bionic-maas-kvm -- cloud-init status --wait

Connect to the container

The following steps should all be completed within the container. Start up a
bash shell.

$ lxc shell bionic-maas-kvm

Setup a virsh maas network

We need to setup a network for MAAS to manage within the container, we will do this with virsh.

$ cat << EOF > maas.xml
<network>
  <name>maas</name>
  <forward mode="nat"/>
  <bridge name="maas" stp="off" delay="0"/>
  <ip address="172.16.99.1" netmask="255.255.255.0"/>
</network>
EOF

$ virsh net-define maas.xml;
$ virsh net-start maas;
$ virsh net-autostart maas;
$ rm maas.xml

Install MAAS snap

Next we need to install the MAAS snap and use the init command to create a database and then create a admin user.

$ snap install --channel=2.7 maas
$ maas init

Copy the SSH keys

MAAS connects to the KVM host via ssh. We need to copy the SSH keys so MAAS can
access them.

$ cp -r /root/.ssh/ /var/snap/maas/current/root/.ssh

Open the UI

To login the UI, open http://$CONTAINER_IP:5240/MAAS/r/

You can skip the ssh key importing.

Enable DHCP

On the subnets tab click untagged next to the subnet defined in maas.xml,
172.16.99.0/24 and enable DHCP.

Add the KVM host

On the KVM tab click ‘Add KVM’ and use the address qemu+ssh://root@127.0.0.1/system

You should now have a KVM added and you can create virtual machines and use
them within MAAS.

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Instead of that you can use

$ lxc exec bionic-maas-kvm -- cloud-init status --wait

and drop the /tmp/startup-complete hack

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