MAAS

Revision 26 as of 2012-04-13 00:45:16

Clear message

Metal as a Service: MAAS

Metal as a Service -- MAAS -- brings the language of the cloud to physical servers. It makes it easy to set up the hardware on which to deploy any service that needs to scale up and down dynamically; a cloud being just one example.

It lets you provision your servers dynamically, just like cloud instances – only in this case, they’re whole physical nodes. “Add another node to the Hadoop cluster, and make sure it has at least 16GB RAM” is as easy as asking for it.

With a simple web interface, you can add, commission, update and recycle your servers at will. As your needs change, you can respond rapidly, by adding new nodes and dynamically re-deploying them between services. When the time comes, nodes can be retired for use outside the MAAS.

Installation and initial set-up

How you install and run MAAS depends largely on whether you have control of the network you're using.

In this guide, we'll look at two common scenarios:

  • You own the network: you own the network you're connecting to and you're happy to let MAAS own that network's DHCP.

  • You're experimenting while using someone else's network: you can't allow MAAS to own the network's DHCP.

We'll look at both of these ways to run MAAS.

You own the network

To start with, let's run through the quickest way to get MAAS up and running. For this quick-start guide, we're assuming that:

  • You own and control the network you're connecting to.
  • You are willing to give MAAS control of that network's DHCP.
  • You have a fresh Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installation that can access the Ubuntu archive (or a local mirror) and you're happy to dedicate that machine to MAAS.
  • That you have knowledge on how to install Ubuntu Server

Installing MAAS from the 12.04 Server CD

  • Download the 12.04 Server Image and burn to your installation media
  • Boot the Server CD
  • Select "Install MAAS or Enlist" TODO Change to new sting & Screenshot image

  • When the "Install or Enlist with MAAS Server" dialog appears

    • Select "Create a New MAAS on this Server"

  • You will get dialog saying the MAAS is installed with the URL to the MAAS Web Interface
  • Installation will complete and reboot

At this point MAAS is installed. Now you can move on to createing your MAAS admin account.

Create MAAS admin account

Once MAAS is installed, you'll need to create your first administrator account.

  • Point your brower at http://ip.address/MAAS

  • You will see instructions on how to create a MAAS admin user by running:

ubuntu@ubuntu-qa-maas:~$ sudo maas createsuperuser

Follow the prompts and MAAS will create an admin account that you can later use to log in. {{ Username (Leave blank to use 'root'): admin E-mail address: me@canonical.com Password: Password (again): Superuser created successfully. ubuntu@lenovo-RD230-01:~$ }}

Configuring DHCP

If you own the network you're working with, MAAS can use DHCP to PXE boot the servers that you connect to your cluster.

There are three ways of handling this:

  • Set up a fresh DHCP server to work with MAAS.
  • Configure your existing DHCP server to work with MAAS.
  • Existing DHCP server you don't control.

For now, we'll look at the first of those: setting up a dedicated DHCP server for MAAS. You can choose whichever DHCP server you prefer but for this guide we'll use dnsmasq via the maas-dhcp package.

Warning /!\ Note: If you go ahead, MAAS will attempt to act as the DHCP server for everything on the same network.

dnsmasq might already be installed, however, it is not configured to work with MAAS. In order to install and/or configure it, enter the following:

sudo apt-get install maas-dhcp

During the installation process, you will be able to able to specify three configuration options. These are:

  • DHCP Range: specify the range from which dnsmasq should allocate IP addresses to servers in your MAAS.

image

  • Gateway: specify the network's Gateway IP address. If your MAAS is the gateway you can leave it as it defaults.

image

  • Domain: if applicable, you will be able to specify your network domain. Otherwise, you can leave this blank.

image

dnsmasq is now running as a DHCP server on your network.

Import the Ubuntu images

MAAS will check for and download new Ubuntu images once a week. However, you'll need to download them manually the first time:

sudo maas-import-isos

Next steps

Now you have a working MAAS. You can log into the web interface at the following address, substitute the hostname for your machine of course:

http://hostname/MAAS

Let's add a couple of nodes.