a few doubts about backing up Landscape and MAAS - VM environment

[Carlos Capriotti]

Hello folks.

I am currently in an adventure installing MAAS, Landscape and OpenStack.

Sparing you excessive details - which I am prone to - let me just quickly
describe my environment to you:

I am using one VM host (Ubuntu 14.04, KVM+qemu) that runs two VMs: the MAAS
server and the Landscape server. Always running Autopilot (or trying to),
and my network has two NICs, with public and private networks. All of my
nodes (7) are physical.

I had ONE successful OpenStack deployment so far, with Autopilot, and ten
or twenty "almost there"s, for various reasons.  Trying to save some time
"the next time I try", I started cloning the VMs after specific milestones,
for instance, an "EMPTY" MAAS, where everything is installed and configured
(ssh keys, openstack, etc), but no nodes were enlisted. Other typical
milestones were "Landscape added", "All nodes Ready", etc.

The next milestone would be after deploying Landscape, and this needs some
explaining: instead of enlisting all of my nodes and the future Landscape
VM, I only enlisted and commissioned the VM, deployed Landscape, and
stopped both VMs (MAAS and the recently installed Landscape), created a
clone of both, and then resumed the operation.

After my last failure (OpenStack failed installing at 95%...), instead of
fetching the logs and opening a new incident, I simply deleted the
"tainted" VMs, and started from my last known-good point, restoring the VMs
I cloned. I was even careful to use the same MAC addresses, specially on
Landscape. Much to my surprise, MAAS did not like the strategy, refused to
recognize Landscape, and I saw myself with gigabytes of useless clones,
which were promptly deleted and I had to start all from scratch. Literally,
from the very installation of MAAS.

So, here are the questions:

1) Regardin VMs and the relationship MAAS-Landscape, what would be the best
way to make a backup and restore it, making sure both will talk to each
other again ?

2) Alternatively, can I deploy a new MAAS and "Attach" a pre-existing,
previous Landscape server to it ? I see the "Attach" option on the GUI, and
even tried it once, but that has already faded from my memory.

In case you are wondering why I would install a new MAAS server and keep
the Landscape machine: I have been facing an issue where MAAS is get
confused with MAC addresses, during the enlist phase, claiming that a
specific MAC already exists, making it impossible to add/commission a node.
There are several moving parts on this problem and it is - I believe -
object of another email or incident, so, I'll let it be for now.

Thanks,

Carlos
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