Moving VLANs/Hosts to another Rackd controller?

Users
1

Howdy,

We were hoping to rebuild one of out rackd controllers and are worried as it has many VLANs and VMs on it.

Are there any relevant docs on how to do this? I wasn’t able to find anything on the topic except this one post from a while back: Move nodes from one rack controller to an other

We tried to just delete it previously and there was an error message stating we needed to first move (or remove) these assets before it could be deleted.

2

I believe we don’t have any official docs about it as it really depends on your setup

3

That seems kinda strange, surely moving VLANs and hosts to other rackd servers is something people want to do often?

4

I can’t provide instructions without knowing your topology and what “hosts” you have on that rack. Are these physical machines? Virsh machines? LXD vms?

Once you add a new rack controller MAAS will detect all its vlans depending on its network settings. So you probably want to create a new rack and then start moving things to the other.

5

The rackd controller in question manager has many physical hosts, as well as many Virsh nodes, with many VMs on them. We don’t use LXD.

I assume the process is something like:

  1. Create a new Ubuntu host for rackd.
  2. Set it up with the same version of rackd software as every other host.
  3. Ensure it has the same network configuration as the previous rackd controller.
  4. Connect it as a rackd controller to regiond.
  5. Move the physical hosts/Virsh hosts/VMs to the new rackd controller.

It’s step 5 that’s a bit of a mystery to me. Do all these hosts just need to be deleted and enlisted on the new controller? Or is there a ‘move’ command? Do the VLANs managed by the previous rackd controller need to also be moved and if so, how would that work?

6

The new rack must have access to the same VLANS.

For physical hosts, you don’t have to do anything because MAAS automatically understands what rack controllers can access the hosts.

For VMs, do you use a virsh kvm host in MAAS or did you just create all the VMs with the Virsh power driver?

7

For physical hosts, you don’t have to do anything because MAAS automatically understands what rack controllers can access the hosts.

Oww interesting that’s handy to know, thank you.

We use a virsh KVM hosts in MAAS yeah. So they all appear under the KVM > Virsh tab in the GUI.