Requesting a feature to export an entire MAAS configuration, including Machines, Pods/KVM, DNS, Subnets, etc, and a feature to take that export and import it into an entirely separate MAAS cluster.
An example use case of this would be to set up a brand new MAAS cluster on new hardware, and then export from your old cluster and import into the new, without it being a postgresql dump and restore and needing to have matching versions of MAAS/PGSQL.
Sounds impossible. All the metadata you mentioned was stored in PostgreSQL. The downgrade has not been supported by MAAS so far and may not be supported in the future because, at each major release, they introduce new features (e.g. the ephemeral deployment in the upcoming 3.5). Machine configuration is per-node based (linked with the machine id), with unique MAC addresses and hardware info.
I’d be fine with the feature not being supported for importing into a lower version of MAAS than the version of MAAS the source export came from.
Even a feature that (technically in the background) just generates all the MAAS API commands it would take to recreate the metadata would be good, similar to dumping SQL statements.
Also if it can include machines even that is fine too, just any sort of migration of configurations ability would be great.
Hi @rsmith21, thanks for reaching out and suggesting a feature! For exporing/importing a MAAS configuration to a new setup, you may just need to upgrade your MAAS instance that is an earlier version to match your new install version. As @maasuser1 mentioned, doing this process between arbitrary MAAS versions may not be possible.
Also, if you haven’t already, take a look at backing up and restoring MAAS
I would take a different approach. I’d like to see an option in the cli to dump all of the active instances as either a JSON file that the cli could also import or as a series of cli commands. We would never use the internal ids and instead everything would be referenced using user parseable names on output and the cli’s job on input would be to convert these back to internal ids.
This avoids the upgrade issues as newer cli’s could just have reasonable defaults and/or someone could tweak the json or script as needed.
One benefit would be for documenting your network (which is why I’m leaning towards json). It would be cool to be able to render the file as a clickable network diagram for mortals and/or use it to populate a network management tool or even an external DHCP or DNS server in a pinch.
FYI…I am the same person as @dzsi.com … new owners…new email
This isn’t necessarily a different approach from what I had in mind. It actually accomplishes exactly what I was looking for: a way to fully convert MAAS-created and configured resources into code, allowing seamless import into another MAAS cluster so all resources reappear there.
