N00b to MaaS and want to build a small half-rack deployment correctly.. PXE?

Hi ,

For background I have used Juju + LXD a bit… and had a taste of MaaS at a job site a year or so ago… it looked really cool and we were looking into adding some boot options that had never been done before in order to control PDUs… My question is this:

I have a

  • Asus Pro ACE x570 , it claims to support WOL by PME, PXE
  • Asus PN51 mini PC
  • an RPi2
  • an Rpi3
  • CyberPower Adaptive Sinewave CP1500EPFCLCD

Plan is to get MaaS installed on either a

  • a cheap old thinkpad

OR

  • dual nic Intel NUC (if I can find any)

Is PXE enough here? Do I need to look into maybe getting a new PDU? I have never really installed or setup MaaS… and wondering if there’s any hiccups or gotchas to look up for as I build a half-rack to tidy up these systems, the networking, and power

Seems like I can just get a box, install MaaS, have the switch downstream of MaaS for all systems I want to powerup or down… and PXE is “enough”

Thanks for looking,

Hi @emcp,

yes. you’re correct. If you’re planning to install MAAS to
test it you don’t really need a full blown production setup, you could just try with the snap and the maas-test-db snap.

As for netboot, PXE is fully supported by MAAS, but if your machines don’t have a supported power control system (e.g. IPMI or AMT), you’ll have to set them to “Manual” and power them on/off directly as MAAS has no way of directly controlling them.

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yes. you’re correct. If you’re planning to install MAAS to
test it you don’t really need a full blown production setup, you could just try with the snap and the maas-test-db snap.

I could likely setup MaaS in an LXD image and wire it using the dual NIC x570 based system I imagine… time to crack on how-to-network in ubuntu :slight_smile: thanks

As for netboot, PXE is fully supported by MAAS, but if your machines don’t have a supported power control system (e.g. IPMI or AMT), you’ll have to set them to “Manual” and power them on/off directly as MAAS has no way of directly controlling them.

this is my concern now… if I want to save electricity to power off the x570 based system automatically when not in use… I must definitely grab a PDU with IPMI or AMT based support of control then? My ambition is oneday to control this completely over the internet from outside the LAN… so it sounds like yes I should grab a PDU then… sooner or later… excellent advice and thank you!

EDIT: after some quick research it seems redfish is a newer emerging open standard for what IPMI does…?? I just am having zero luck understanding which hardware to buy to get started with either ATM, IPMI, or Redfish to control my power

https://tinkertry.com/supermicro-superserver-redfish-api

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@emcp, sadly, we aren’t able to recommend much in the way of “which servers do i pick,” since we don’t have the experience with your particular configuration. that said, what are your decision criteria for choosing a server? maybe i can help you construct a decision matrix that you can use to score the options, if you’re interested.