Hi,
I believe some fantastic features/options are missing.
1- a text box to define the number of machines need to be created.
2- a text box to tag mass machine creation.
3- ability to take snapshot
4- list of vms associated with the kvm host in kvm host page.
I would add also some possibilities to customize the virtual hardware (switch to virtio-scsi instead of virtio-block, customize CPU model, …)
Hi @sysnasri,
These are fantastic suggestions! I wonder if I can learn more about your suggestions to get this right.
I think the ability to define the number of machines is a really good idea.
How many machines do you usually create in one go? I’m assuming, you don’t care about the hostnames and would rather just generate you any name for a number of machines you need? What are you trying to achieve when creating several machines at the time?
Tagging is a great idea! I just realized that tag is missing. When creating several machines, do you tag then the same way?
do you mean LXD snapshots?
Thanks for these suggestions, very useful!
Hi,
Nowadays 3 machines are minimum to run a cluster. i would rather like to go for 10 machines in one go for example. as you mentioned I don’t care about hostname.
these machines would be part of juju charm machines for future deployment of any kind of application either cluster or standalone.
In my scenario I went for deploying an experimental openstack with juju charms thus I have to tag my machines
LXD or KVM does not matter
Would be great to have something similar to what Openstack does when spawning multiple machines from image at once … either you don’t supply a base name and then, you end with complete random names for each machine (the way it does currently in fact) or, if you specify a basename (like “test”) then you postfix the name with an incremental number (like “test1”, “test2”, “test3”, …)
I have thought about this but came to the conclusion that creating vm is not maas’s primary job.
Depends … KVM hosts are very usefull when you want to mutualize hardware to deploy some specific workload where the underlying virtualization host don’t have to bother about high availability because HA is done at the application level.
For example, in our use case, we use KVM hosts to deploy openstack/Kubernetes control plane components.
Those components are HA by design (or through the help of some other components) and that way, we can mutualize 3 big hypervisors to support those VMs for multiple clusters while we would need to deploy at least 3 bare metal machines per cluster to do the same with MaaS/Juju.
Cherry on the cake : with MaaS, you can very easily deploy a bare metal hypervisor that will be automatically be configured as a KVM host you can use right away to deploy those virtualised control planes I was talking about.
No more chicken and eggs dilemma.
So just to sumarize, I love this KVM host feature but it lacks just a few things to be a lot more usable (like mass compose or more precise hardware tuning)
Makes me think that a kind of “hardware template” would be nice … let’s say there would a tab where you can create a hardware template where you set things like CPU type, vcpu numbers, disk type and layout, network configuration, … and then, at compose time, you just select a hardware template to compose “n machines of type x with base name ZZZ”.
That would be awesome and would avoid the “clickodrome” effect.
Same thing for hardware commissioning would be really awesome too !
Interesting suggestions. Thank you so much.
@Hybrid512 Is your use case with clusters and creating machines similar to @sysnasri? Do you also apply tags and create several machines of same configuration at the same time?
I wonder how you are using snapshots in the context of machines in MAAS.
@amylily I suppose yes or at least not far from that.
Right now, I’m not concerned about snapshots, I would just like to be able to compose multiple machines of the same type at once.
Right now, I’m using KVM hosts to spin Openstack controle plane VMs so basically, 3 VMs of the same kind at once.
In a typical deployment I use 3x3 control planes VMs … 3 VMs for “DB” with their own specs, 3 VMs for control plane components (also with their own specs) and 3 “network nodes” with different specs too … So 9 VMs of 3 different kinds.
So, the ideal situation for me would be to be able to define 3 “VM templates” with their own specs and then, compose 3 VMs of a kind at once.
In the current situation, I must compose each machine one by one with dozens of clicks through the UI or better, use MaaS cli to script that.
@amylily
I want to know a little more about the progress! it is really necessary to create multiple vms in one go.
Hi @sysnasri
Thank you for raising this feedback, I have looked into this with the team and we will be doing some prioritization on this soon. For now, feel free to create multiple VMs via the LXD CLI. 
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