[HH] Metal as a Service

[Federico Lucifredi]

On May 27, 2013, at 4:43 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com> wrote:

> Federico Lucifredi wrote:
>> You can think of MAAS as a PXE server on steroids.
> 
> Makes sense.
> 
> 
>> IPMI.
> 
> I see.
> 
> I wonder...adding an IPMI controller - which has to remain up and
> running constantly - may end up using as much power as some of the low
> power ARM boards that you'd be managing in my proposed scenario.
> 
> Does MAAS only work with IPMI? I'm assuming if you power up a node by
> some other means, it'll still respond to the net boot request.

It also supports Wake on Lan

> 
> But really all you need is an ability to power cycle a specific node.
> Eventually someone will hack together a computer controlled power
> supply...a bunch of USB jacks, each with its own individually
> addressable transistor, all controlled by a Pi or Arduino with an
> Ethernet shield.

A used datacenter network-addressable power strip from e-bay would do as well.

> 
>> - PXE support on ARM hobbist level boards is poor or non-existent...
> 
> Hardware limitation or lack of firmware?

ARM lacking support for basic standards, like hardware enumeration. Some are being remedied in firmware form, others are being resolved through U-boot extensions (PXE) as an interim solution.
> 
>> - Ubuntu does not run on R.PI boards...
> 
> But that only matters for the controlling node, right? MAAS can be used
> to deploy other operating systems to the nodes, no?
> 
> Do you need to be able to run Ubuntu on the node at least once to enroll
> it in MAAS? (I see the setup menu for Ubuntu Server has an option to
> join the machine to a MAAS network.)

Exactly. A small image is passed down to retrieve hardware inventory, etc.

> 
>> "Managing" to MAAS means controlling a pool of PXE-driven devices
>> that were enlisted under its control, and provisioning what is
>> installed on them.
> 
> I didn't get what actually happened when a node was enrolled. I gather
> there is some communication between the node's IPMI controller and the
> master node to capture the target node's address? Maybe also capturing
> the MAC of the node so it can be mapped to the desired OS boot image?
> 
> 
>> Usually "deployment" or "provisioning" is used in
>> this context, rather than managing.
> 
> Sure, MAAS is just dealing with the power up/OS boot/power down aspects,
> and not management of the node while it is running, like a cloud
> management tool would.
> 
> No doubt someone will (or has already) integrate MAAS into a cloud
> management tool. In some cases it could be used to deploy hypervisors to
> the bare metal. On other cases you might transparently manage services
> across a mix of VMs and bare metal.
> 
MAAS is already integrated with Juju, Ubuntu's service provisioning and scale-out system - and we integrated it with Landscape last year.

But in terms of what it supports, it is Ubuntu-only — and Ubuntu server only at that, although changing that would be easy, if Desktops were provisioned over LAN more often.

Best -F

_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C