How to migrate machines from one MAAS server to another (both in same lab)

[blingstatus]

Hello,

I need a little bit of direction on how to do this. I don’t need too much hand holding here, but if someone could give me a high level overview of what I need to do to get this done I would greatly appreciate it. I’m sorry if this is a noob question but I’m having a bit of trouble navigating the documentation that is available and I was hoping that the forum users could quickly help me out. I’d be happy to thoroughly document my process once I am done so that future netizens can follow along and do the same thing I did.

If there is a document that already outlines how to do this that I’ve missed I’d be happy to go read it if someone could link me there. Thank you advance.

[pal-arlos]

Hello,
not an answer to your question, but just a signal that I’m at the same spot right now. Did you find a way forward?
BR

[nateybobo]

Are you trying to move VMs from one maas node to another?

[pal-arlos]

No.
I’ve got two MAAS deployments. One (A) that started as a trail, and another (B) that started later. Each deployment has a set of hosts (physical), that it is ‘owning’. Now, the first deployment A needs a serious physical update. However some of the deployed hosts in A are in production, so they cannot be shutdown/recommissioned/configured. So, I’d like to move those hosts, logically, over to the B deployment. I.e. I want those hosts to show up in B’s MAAS, so that I can manage (shutdown/commision/etc. ) if its required.

I hope that I explained my use case.

BR/Patrik

[nateybobo]

I’ve never done this, but it might be possible to move the MAAS “A” rack controller to the MAAS “B” region controller. See: https://maas.io/docs/snap/2.8/ui/rack-controllers#heading--unregister-a-rack-controller

You might run into the same frustration I had when trying to migrate VMs between MAAS nodes: it might auto commission the machine for you.

Is there a way to skip auto commissioning?

I REALLY hate the auto-commissioning feature in MaaS. If I add a VM on a KVM pod outside of MaaS (ie. virt-manager), and then refresh the pod, it automatically commissions the VM. If I add a machine manually, it also automatically commissions it. I just want to be able to opt-out of it before MaaS decides to shutdown the machine and start commissioning. A solution would be to add an option to skip commissioning and label the system something like “non-MaaS” where you could only really use the…

[billwear]

@blingstatus, did you ever successfully migrate your machine?

[dparv]

I just tried using root and pre-configuring authorized_keys on the remote machine:

virsh migrate domain qemu+ssh://remote-maas-server/system  --copy-storage-all

and it worked just fine

[brokensyntax]

Far too late to be helpful, but based on some troubleshooting I’ve been doing recently, I’m considering how this might be done.

Things appear to be stored in a combination of a SQL DB and JSON files.
I’ve gone through most of the schema at this point, and it seems like it should be possible to extract entries from one, and deposit them into the other MaaS server.

I would say I will test this, but my backlog of tasks before setting up my home lab again is pretty large.

I’d like to though.