XenServer template, or template containing a full partition scheme

Hi!

I’m trying to build a custom template for MAAS to offer Citrix Hypervisor image (Citrix XenServer).
Using packer is relatively simple to create a base installation image of xenserver, but creating a usable maas image from that install is something else.

Is there a way to create or deploy image that would contain the whole partition scheme, like using Blank disk layout ? Where could in find information about image creation requirements to get a successful deployment using a custom template ?

Thank you!

Hi there,
Currently, MAAS does not support Xenserver deployments outright. It may just work if you upload it as a custom image with a filetype of ddraw, but that is not officially supported. There is on going work to take a fully static ubuntu image (efi partition, boot partition and root fs) and deploy it, which should get this closer to working, but Xenserver would still not be officially supported, as MAAS attempts to configure things after the image is written to disk that would need modification for Xenserver.

Thanks for the response!

If we can get xenserver to be deployed thru maas, the post-configuration of xenserver should be relatively easy, including regeneration of new uuid’s to avoid conflict if a cluster is configured.
We’ve done that for a virtual appliance of xenserver.

Well that’s the part that requires development work (probably worth a feature request) in order to support Xenserver, as MAAS will attempt to run commands on custom images as if it were a Linux machine with specific dependencies after the image has been written to disk currently.

Feature request created: Feature Request: support for Citrix XenServer/xcp-ng OS

the ideal method to deploy XenServer would be using pxeboot installation with answer file, would this be against MaaS objective?

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As MAAS currently works, on commisioning and initial deployment of a machine, the machine will PXE boot an ephemeral squashfs ubuntu image. in the case of non-ubuntu images being deployed, it will write the image to disk and then boot into that OS once the installation has finished. It then will boot locally on subsequent reboots.

Do you think from a design perspective of MAAS, that it would be possible to perform an OS installation via PXEboot installation, like kickstart ?
This would definitely simplify the support of XenServer in MAAS since it would leverage a supported installation method by XenServer; and from the answerfile we could add what’s required for MAAS to know the installation completed successfully.

Well in the case of an ephemeral deployment, the deployment OS is PXE booted and not written to disk. It’s worth trying to boot XenServer as an ephemeral deployment. But anything you wish to persist would require additional work in MAAS.

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