Adding a KVM pod over the UI doesn’t provide the option to skip commissioning pre-existing VMs

[Peter Sabaini]

UI enhancement: when configuring a virsh pod, maas immediately paves over existing KVMs without asking for confirmation. From a principle of least astonishment point of view maas should probably ask for confirmation before performing an operation that cannot be undone.

Version 2.2.0+bzr6054-0ubuntu1~16.04.1

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

Hi Peter,

This has been done by design and it is exactly the same behavior as to when we added a 'Virsh' Chassis. Since the 'pods' concept is that MAAS will manage all available resources, MAAS will commissioning whatever has been pre-created to correctly gather information on it.

[Dean Henrichsmeyer (dean)]

If that's by design, we should re-design it. It's poor UX. If you add a virsh POD that has existing KVMs it should error, not nuke data. At the very least there should be an exceptional confirmation where we warn them that there are existing KVMs and the data will be nuked.

[Blake Rouse (blake-rouse)]

No data will be nuked. We do not auto deploy the machines! The machine will just be commissioned to gather the VM's information.

[Xav Paice (xavpaice)]

So, commissioning a box does nothing at all to the disk on the machine? It does reboot the machine, which is far from ideal if you don't know that's going to happen.

From what I could tell testing yesterday, with a Maas 2.2.2 setup on Xenial, I added a pod using the virsh params for a machine which wasn't previously known to maas. There were two VMs already defined on that host, one for the maas service itself, and one named 'dhcp1'. Adding the pod left the maas VM alone (thankfully) and rebooted the dhcp1 VM into 'commissioning', after which it was left unable to boot normally. The VM has since been deleted and recreated, which means I am unable to tell the extent of what actually happened to it's disk image.

[Dean Henrichsmeyer (dean)]

Whether it nukes data or not, MAAS is taking something down that it did not create as a side effect of another action. At the very least there should be a confirmation required from the user acknowledging that it's going to happen and/or a way to opt-out of the commissioning of existing VMs.

[Chris Sanders (chris.sanders)]

Was this bug removed from development as the last update seems to imply?

[Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten)]

imported from https://github.com/canonical/maas-ui/issues/1526

[Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten)]

If this has been fixed for LXD, should we still aim to fix it for virsh as it will be deprecated anyways?

[Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten)]

setting to invalid for MAAS as this can be done in maas-ui

[Thorsten Merten (thorsten-merten)]

is this still an issue in current MAAS and especially also with LXD?