MAAS 2.5.0 beta 1 released

News
1

MAAS 2.5.0 (beta1)

Important announcements

MAAS architectural and high-availability changes

MAAS 2.5 introduces several improvements that change the interaction between controllers and machines. More specifically:

  • Communication will now be proxied through the rack controllers. Machines will no longer communicate with the region controller directly.
  • Rack-to-region configuration no longer needs VIPs for HA environments.

For more details, please read the following section.

New features & improvements

Proxying communication through the rack controller

Starting with MAAS 2.5, all machine communication to MAAS will be through the rack controller. As of 2.5.0 alpha 2, MAAS uses a proxy for HTTP (metadata), DNS communication and APT Proxying via Squid. As of 2.5.0 alpha 3, the last remaining changes have been introduced:

  • MAAS uses syslog to gather logs from the enlistment, commissioning and deployment processes that server admins can use for debugging purposes. This communication is now also proxied through the rack controller and sent to all region controllers. (This information is still available in /var/log/maas/rsyslog.)

  • MAAS rack controllers now communicate syslog information to the region. Previously, the rack controllers would only log syslog information locally (to maas.log). In environments with multiple rack controllers, admins had to ssh into those machines to be able to view logs. Starting from beta1, users can now see the log information of all region and rack controllers on any region controller.

  • Users can now configure a remote syslog server in case they don’t want their machines to send syslog information to the MAAS controllers. (Note that this is the same information noted above, which includes enlistment, commissioning and deployment process logs.) This won’t forward MAAS controllers’ syslog to the external server, only machine syslog information.

Storage Support for CentOS (and RHEL)

MAAS now supports configuring storage for CentOS and RHEL deployments. The support includes:

  • Custom partitions with different filesystems (with the exception of ZFS and Bcache)
  • LVM
  • RAID

Note that Bcache and ZFS are not included as part of this support, provided that at the time of enablement, these were not supported on CentOS 7. Also note that this requires a new curtin version that is also available in our PPA’s.

Thanks to the Curtin team for adding the ability to configure storage in CentOS/RHEL for us to use in MAAS.

KVM

In addition to the improvements included in MAAS 2.5.0 alpha2, MAAS 2.5.0 beta1 is now more intelligent about how it attaches to default networks defined in the hypervisor. In the past, MAAS would look for a maas network and attach to that and otherwise attach to a default network. MAAS now checks to see if DHCP is managed by libvirt before attaching. If DHCP is managed by libvirt, MAAS will not be able to PXE boot the machines in order to manage them.

Starting with MAAS 2.5.0 beta1, MAAS will fall back to attaching to a network on the hypervisor known to be DHCP-enabled in MAAS, even if that network is not associated with a network in libvirt.

ESXi

Expanding the support for ESXi introduced in MAAS 2.5 alpha 2, ESXi deployment now supports network configuration. This is limited to:

  • DHCP
  • Static/auto IP assignments
  • Aliases
  • VLANs
  • Bonds - bonds are mapped to NIC teaming as follows:
    • balance-rr - portid
    • active-backup - explicit
    • 802.3ad - iphash, LACP rate and XMIT hash policy settings are ignored.

For more information on how to deploy ESXi, please contact Canonical.

Web UI

The MAAS 2.5.0 alpha 2 UI has been refreshed:

  • Improvements to the machine listing page now include more information about the machines.

Known issues & workarounds

  • LP: #1792031 - DHCP configuration timeouts
    It has been reported that MAAS will apparently fail to configure DHCPd (it times out). The initial investigation seems to yield that this may just be a spurious failure, provided that MAAS re-attempts to configure DHCP and succeeds afterwards.

While we continue to investigate to find the root cause, if you come across this issue, it has also been reported that restarting the rack controller (maas-rackd) would solve the issue.

Bug fixes

Please refer to the following for all bug fixes in this release.

https://launchpad.net/maas/+milestone/2.5.0beta1

Installation

MAAS 2.5.0 beta 1 can be installed from our PPA as follows:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:maas/next
sudo apt install maas