State of MAAS managing VM's on VMWare 7.x using VMware power driver

Hey folks! I wanted to check on the state of managing VM’s with MAAS on VMware 7.x and if anyone has any experiences with it that they could share.

I’m looking at managing our Ubuntu deployments on VMware in addition to our physical servers, but I could not find much about it in the documentation or here on Discourse.

What versions of VMware does the power driver support?
Which roles/permissions does the VMware power driver user need?

tl;dr: I think the driver will support VMWare 7.x without hiccups, but YMMV; see below for permissions answers.

MAAS is able to manage Virtual Machines (VMs) on a number of platforms, including VMware. I just read the code (in provisioningserver/drivers/power/vmware.py in the MAAS git codebase), and it appears to be very generic and likely forward-compable. The official MAAS documentation does not provide specific details about VMware 7.x support (bad me), but I know we have supported ESXI 7 for quite a while.

As for the roles/permissions needed by the VMware power driver user, here’s the general idea:

  • The user should have sufficient permissions to power on/off VMs. This is typically done by assigning the user to a role with the necessary privileges and associating them with the relevant VMs or folders.
  • The user should have permissions to read VM attributes. This includes power state and other hardware details.
  • If MAAS will be managing the creation and deletion of VMs, the user will need additional permissions. These include the ability to create and delete VMs, as well as to modify VM settings.

Remember that these are general guidelines, and the exact permissions needed may vary based on your VMware setup and how you plan to use MAAS – and you’ll need to try the driver to confirm that it works as you expect. If it doesn’t, by the way, we do welcome community code in the form of PRs. :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for the tldr @billwear! We’ll give it a go in our test environment.