Deploying Machines with MaaS and Packer - Metal as a Service + Hashicorp Packer Tutorial

MaaS or Metal as a service from Canonical is a great way to provision bare metal machines as well as virtual machines. MaaS allows you to deploy Windows, Linux, ESXi, and many other operating systems to your systems helping you to build a bare metal cloud. You can even use Packer from Hashicorp to configure custom images too! We'll cover all of this and more in this tutorial on how to install and configure MaaS from start to finish with Packer!

A HUGE THANKS to Micro Center for sponsoring today's video.

(Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.)

#baremetal #ubuntu #canonical

00:00 - What is MaaS (Metal as a Service) from Canonical?
02:00 - Micro Center / $25 Off CPUs! (Sponsor)
03:00 - Installing MaaS
06:56 - Initial MaaS Configuration
09:41 - Importing your SSH Key
10:23 - Networking Configuration & Discovery
14:05 - PXE & Network Boot with DHCP
15:33 - Commissioning a Machine (Initial Discovery)
18:45 - Power Types & Wake on LAN (WOL)
20:50 - Commissioning a Machine Part 2 (For real this time)
24:00 - Deploying Ubuntu
26:15 - SSH in to machine
26:54 - Creating Custom Images with Hashicorp Packer
33:40 - Uploading a Custom Image to MaaS
38:05 - What do I think of MaaS from Canonical?
39:57 - Stream Highlight - "100 + 50 subs dropped 🫳🎤"

Thank you for watching!

[lzcpg]

Hi! MAAS team member here, great video! You mentioned you hit an issue with the deb package, we'd be very curious to hear about it if you're willing to tell us more, and feel free to open a bug report (I'd post the link here to do so, but seems YouTube doesn't allow external links here).

[ThePC_Geek]

To provision PXE boot settings in pfsense: Go to Services, DHCP Server. Click on your respective VLAN/network on the tabs that show, make sure 'ignore bootp' is off. scroll down, expand "network booting' by clicking the blue button then check the 'enable' box. enter in the 'next server' as your MAAS IP and default BIOS file name as the pxelinux.0 nothing else needs to be filled in there.

[stephenreaves]

Love bringing enterprise tech to the homelab. I'm running OpenShift on bare metal and it has a built-in bare metal provisioner (powered by Ironic) and it's amazing. Especially with the assisted installer

[minifig]

IPMI makes some of this machine onboarding (commissioning, power cycling, running tests, etc) a lot easier, but cool that you tested with a nuc.

[Transmissions]

We provision thousands of boxes on both on-prem and in the cloud. We're looking at MaaS to takeover regular bare metal deployments. We're already using Sidero Metal and Talos for k8s bare metal clusters. Awesome video.

[AlexanderArzner]

I'm glad that Johnny Depp started releasing such cool videos.

[DimitarChakarov]

In pfSense I believe the setting it is pretty simple - under Services - DHCP Server - scroll down to Other Options - Network Booting.

[DericChau-pw]

Yo this is an awesome run down of maas. I knew the majority of it already but your explaination was awesome! Subbing!

[georgeferguson]

It's my first time hearing about MaaS, My first thought of using it would be for malware analysis. Some malware will detect it is within a VM. This may be a way to setup a bare metal server do your analysis and wipe the machine.

[bitonchen]

I Just wanted to say that youre a life saver!
easy to follow guide...
Keep going!!

[RabidTunes]

Great video, seems like something really useful for my 3 raspberries and my 2 laptops!










On a side note though, I might (and I hope to) be wrong about this but during the video it seemed to me that you weren't very "happy" while recording this (tired perhaps?), I don't want to speculate I just hope you're doing okay, your content is superb and you are great and I just wanted to remind you that❤

[JohnMatthew]

Love this video, i always knew MAAS was awesome, thank you for showing us.

[codispatch]

Thanks Tim for sharing this video 🙏. Was looking for some thing like this for long time 🙂

[JasonBreitweg]

Can you post a link to your 3 NUC rack mount kit?

[youNOOBsickle]

Holy cow! You would make this video 2 months after I spent hours and hours setting this up. 🤣 I love that I can count on you to tinker with all the most awesome stuff though.

[Ne_Vectr]

Would be nice to define a template for a VLAN so I can deploy a lot of machines fast in a setup lan

[sachasmart]

This is an incredible work. Thank you for the work you do.

[funpunx]

Any interest or experience with Openstack Ironic or Equinix's Metal?

[xokaido]

Hello Tim, thank you very much for your great videos. it would be nice if you could record a video doing automatic node scaling for Kubernetes based on the load.

[ikerstges]

I assume MaaS and Packer can also distrbute Rancher's harvester hypervisor? Great explanation of this software-combo, clear and mixed with some humor and fun! 🙂👍 Thank you! (I too prefer to stay away from snapd btw)