MAAS 2.7 Released

Welcome to MAAS 2.7, a major update to Canonical’s Metal as a Service - the smartest way to manage bare metal.

This latest release of MAAS offers the following:

  • Network link disconnect detection
    • MAAS will report disconnected network cables
    • Administrators can change cable connection status through API/UI, after manually rectifying the situation
    • Users will receive a warning when trying to configure a disconnected interface
    • Machines will have to be recommissioned to gather this data
  • Slow network link detection
    • MAAS will automatically detect link and interface speed during commissioning and report them via the API/UI
    • Administrators can change or update the link and interface speeds via the API/UI after manual changes to the connection
    • Machines will have to be recommissioned to gather this data
  • Link speed reporting
    • Users can filter hosts by their link speed in the UI
    • Users can allocate hosts by their link speed in the API
    • Users can list machines by their link speed in the API
    • Machines will have to be recommissioned to gather this data
  • Network validation scripts and testing
    • Users can test their network configuration to check for:
      • Interfaces which have a broken network configuration
      • Bonds that are not fully operational
      • Broken gateways, rack controllers, and Internet links
      • Unreachable URLs
    • Administrators can:
      • Upload network tests and test scripts
      • Create tests which accept an interface and URL parameter
      • Create scripts which apply custom network configurations
    • Users can:
      • Specify (unique) parameters using API for all commissioning and test scripts of any type
      • Specify URLs to be tested from the UI and API
      • See the overall status of all interfaces via the API, the UI Machine list, and the UI Interfaces tab
      • See the health status from all interface tests
      • View interface test results by interface name and MAC
      • Override machines which fail network testing (allowing their use)
      • Suppress individual failed network tests
  • Live IP address detection to prevent address conflicts
    • MAAS will detect IPs in use on a subnet and avoid assigning that IP to a MAAS-managed machine
    • MAAS will recognize when the subnet ARP cache is full and re-check the oldest IPs added to the cache to search for free IP addresses
  • Introductory NUMA / SR-IOV support
    • MAAS will guarantee that existing machines are assigned to a single NUMA node that contains all the machine’s resources; note that recommissioning is needed to gather NUMA / SR-IOV data.
      • User can specify NUMA node index for interfaces and physical block devices from the API
      • MAAS will display the NUMA node index and details
      • Users can see the count of available NUMA nodes, along with CPU cores, memory, NICS, and node spans for bonds, block devices
      • Users can filter machines by CPU cores, memory, subnet, VLAN, fabric, space, storage, RAID, and so forth
  • CentOS 8 image support
    • Users can now deploy CentOS 8 images in MAAS
    • Note that users of previous versions may see CentOS 8 available as an option, but cannot download or deploy it
  • Settings and user preferences re-designed
    • This is part of our efforts to make the UI faster and more responsive
  • Strictly-confined Snap support
    • With 2.7, MAAS is fully confined within the container, which also takes advantage of the security features of confined snaps.
    • No need for installation qualifiers (such as “–devmode”) to permit use of resources outside the Snap container
  • Update to hardware information gathering methods
    • MAAS has switched hardware information gathering from lshw/lsblk to lxd output during commissioning, because it more easily provides the information needed to complete resource discovery
    • Note that this information may not be particularly reliable for your use, so you may need to create your own commissioning scripts if you need something more detailed or specific

A number of bug fixes (see the list in Launchpad).

6 Likes

Cool! When should we expect this release to appear at http://ppa.launchpad.net/maas/stable/ubuntu?

Never. That PPA has been deprecated - https://launchpad.net/~maas/+archive/ubuntu/stable

We have moved to the model of a PPA per major version, so ppa:maas/2.7 for example

1 Like

Ah, that’s useful information! Thanks.