How can i take care of BMC and SMARTNIC-OS using MAAS

Users
1

Hi All,

As per my understanding, MAAS can discover and deploy OS in a host machine.

With respect to BMC other than creating a username/password, is it possible to take care of firmware/OS running in BMC as part of lifecycle management ? If MAAS is not meant for that is there any other tool which can do the same?

With respect to SMARTNICs with ARM cores, can i install OS via out-of-band ethernet port or via Inband interfaces?

2

At present, MAAS does not have a feature to update the BMC firmware/OS. The way to achieve this currently is to bundle any required vendor-specific tools into a custom OS image and use these for lifecycle management.

In regards to SmartNICs, MAAS can only currently provision the OS for the ARM cores of a Bluefield SmartNIC through the host only. However, it is in our roadmap to enable provisioning through the SmartNIC’s BMC in a future release.

3

Thanks for the reply @andyls

In the case of BMC, what you are suggesting is, once host-OS is installed it can connect to BMC to update firmware and OS in it. Is my understanding right?

With respect to SMARTNIC, how can I use MAAS provision BFB via host? Is there any document for the same?

4

Hi there,

Yes, your understanding is correct. Once the host is commissioned, it is possible to update and manage the BMC firmware, provided that the OS image you are deploying contains the tools and firmwares you require to do these things, so you will need to modify an OS image to this end.

With regards to SmartNICs and MAAS, we don’t currently have documentation to this end but it is being worked on.

Hope this helps.

5

Hi @andyls

With respect to BMC is there any specific reason MAAS skipped support for BMC ecosystem via BMC ethernet interface?

I have seen in-house implementations in my previous work where every server had BMC and it is taken care by the lifecycle manager for security purposes. In this way individual engineers have no access to tamper OS infrastructure.

6

Each vendor has different software and versions for each BMC, it’s not feasible to develop and maintain hundreds of integrations over the time (for hardware that we might not even have)

Instead, I think it would be feasible and interesting if MAAS exposes some interfaces to let the users write and plugin their own integrations with the BMCs. Same would apply to power parameters, so that we can also let the community develop such integrations

1 Like
7

I totally agree with @r00ta

8

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