Metal-as-a-Service in an existing environment

Question

We're looking at MaaS for our bare metal server environment to replace old school kickstart scripts. MaaS works great if you want to go with the full "reimage everything" train. However, we have many machines where we don't have the time (or it's extremely disruptive) to re-image... in order to "cut over" to MaaS.

In short: Is it possible to add a machine to MaaS in such a way that it allows said machine to boot as normally, like it does with machines that are re-imaged? I understand that there is testing and inventory collection steps in MaaS, which is perfectly ok. I just can't re-image thousands of machines just to use MaaS.

Answer 1

Rather than adding a machine as normal and somehow skipping the imaging, the answer is to add the server in question as a "device". When you add a device to MaaS (with it's MAC/IP), then MaaS just skips any sort of PXE boot manipulation for that machine.

Later you can delete the device, reboot the server again, and allow it to goto imaging inventory/imaging as normal.