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

[Andreas Hasenack]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 3:12 PM, Carlos Capriotti <
capriotti.carlos at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>


That shouldn't be needed. Could you elaborate on those failed attempts you
had? The autopilot collects logs from failed attempts and offers you a
chance to file a bug with them. If you do that, we can take a look at what
went wrong.


>
> 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 ?
>

Deploying Landscape takes just a few minutes, and you shouldn't have to
tear it down each time. I'd say this snapshotting is not worth it.


>
> 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.
>

Just leave MAAS and Landscape installed, there should really be no need to
start over really from scratch each time.


>
> 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.
>

I haven't seen that before. Specially if you are using real nodes enlisted
in MAAS.
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