MAAS

Very fast server provisioning for your data centre

Self-service, remote installation of Windows, CentOS, ESXi and Ubuntu on real servers turns your data centre into a bare metal cloud.

Welcome to metal-as-a-service.

Data centre automation

Your next rack is a bare metal cloud.
Metal-As-A-Service (MAAS) provisioning with Windows, ESXi, Linux.

  • Bare metal cloud with on-demand servers
  • Remote edge cluster operations
  • Infrastructure monitoring and discovery
  • Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT, Juju integration
  • Super fast install from scratch
  • VMWare ESXi, Windows, CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu
  • Custom images with pre-installed apps
  • Disk and network configuration
  • API-driven DHCP, DNS, PXE, IPAM
  • REST API for provisioning
  • LDAP user authentication
  • Role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Hardware testing and commissioning

Deploy any OS image
on any hardware

MAAS delivers the fastest OS installation times in the industry thanks to its optimised image-based installer.
You can deploy:

Key features

  • Automation ›Automatic discovery of every network device. BMC ops with IPMI, AMT and other protocols. PXE over IPv4 and IPv6 networks. APIs for DNS, DHCP, IPAM, server configuration and provisioning.
  • Speed ›Zero-touch deployment of Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows and RHEL. Full deployment time is approximately two boot cycles plus two minutes for disk imaging.
  • Inventory ›Discover every PCI and USB device in every server. Inventory disk models and serial numbers. Provision machines based on specific configuration details to optimize your applications.
  • Storage layouts ›Create advanced filesystem layouts with RAID, bcache, LVM, ZFS and more. Automate storage configuration through APIs. Allocate servers based on storage.
  • IPAM, DHCP, DNS ›Configure server network interfaces with bridges, VLANs, bonds and addresses. Integrated, best of breed, highly available, open source DHCP and DNS.
  • Hardware testing ›Run tests to get up to date information about hardware health. Benchmark disk, RAM, CPU and network performance.
  • DevOps on bare metalIntegration with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT, and Juju. REST API, CLI and Python bindings enable full lifecycle and project automation.
  • Network monitoring ›Continuously observes network traffic and catalogs every active IP address of unknown origin. Discovers rogue devices, IPs and MAC addresses. Drives active scanning of network ranges.
  • Authentication and IdentityIntegrate with LDAP, Active Directory or SAML for central identity management and single-sign-on (SSO) across multiple MAAS regions.
  • Composable systemsDrive Cisco UCS, Intel RSD, HP Moonshot, and more. Supports dynamic hardware composition with Intel RSD.
  • Cloud metadataReuse standard cloud operations with cloud-init and metadata services. Hybrid multi-cloud operations now include bare metal, with no change in applications.
  • KVM micro-cloudDesignate servers to host KVM virtual machines to be dynamically provisioned alongside physical servers.

Real servers,
self-service

You run the data centre, but your end users decide what they want to do with the hardware. They love the cloud experience, but it’s more efficient for you to own the hardware.

MAAS provides super-fast self-service provisioning of Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS and ESXi.

Learn more about server provisioning with MAAS

Bare-metal,
cloud experience

MAAS implements all the standard features of a public cloud — like instance metadata and cloud-init. Your customers get complete control of the deployed machine.

Canonical created cloud-init and leads the project globally; we ensure that MAAS provides a first-class cloud experience for physical servers based on x86, ARM64, POWER and Z architectures.

Real-world MAAS

Flexibility

EDGE

MAAS KVM for micro-clouds and edge computing

Blog post

The importance of bare metal provisioning in edge computing

Webinar

Ease of use

SMALL & MEDIUM BUSINESS

MAAS — Fast and efficient virtualisation for small and medium enterprises

Blog post

Scale

DATA CENTRE

Large-scale automated hardware testing with MAAS

Whitepaper

Storage

Inventory, testing and benchmarking

MAAS detects and inventories all the disks, in every server. You’ll have a single database of every model and serial number.

MAAS tests disks either non-destructively or destructively, with short or long write cycles, and learns about their performance.

RAID, LVM, Bcache, ZFS and more

Auto-tagging of SSD and rotary disk types makes it easy to know which disks to use for each application.

Your users configure the storage of any server they control: RAID, LVM, Bcache and ZFS. Configure boot, applications and backup disks exactly where you want them — and get the installed machine, a few minutes later.

Network

Detection and configuration

The most error-prone part of data centre operations is the network.

MAAS enables rapid convergence on a correct network configuration — for every server, in every rack. All NICs are detected and inventoried when a machine is enlisted in MAAS.

Discover the topology of the network — which NIC is plugged into which port on which switch. MAAS tests access to specific VLANs from each NIC.

Network bonds and VLANs can be configured too. Set all significant network operating properties through MAAS — and then validate that configuration with ephemeral machine booting and testing.

Monitoring

MAAS rack controllers provide local endpoints for all infrastructure services in the rack itself, and they also monitor the local network for rogue devices, IP addresses and MAC addresses.

Over time, you’ll know if there are ‘extra’ devices plugged into any fabric or VLAN that MAAS is asked to monitor.

Solve network mysteries faster with distributed network analysis and observation.

source : https://maas.io/?_ga=2.241834050.117130858.1633948780-930703166.1633948780