Deploying an LXD VM host doesn't allow you to specify storage

[Chris]

I have HP DL380 Gen 9 physical servers with 300GB OS disks and 18TB of storage on /dev/sdb. When I deploy the server with Ubuntu 22.04 and choose to make it an LXD vmhost - it installs but uses a storage of type "disk" and there isn't an option to specify /dev/sdb to be a zfs storage. I've also not found instructions for changing the default storage to /dev/sdb as zfs.

[Jack Lloyd-Walters (lloydwaltersj)]

Hi there!

I should probably begin with the following quote from this docs post, https://discourse.maas.io/t/about-machine-customisation/7902:

> MAAS doesn’t currently support deploying with ZFS for devices other than the root one. For this reason, ZFS is not recommended.

I do, however, remember seeing some users talking about using ZFS for custom machine storage layouts that are applied after deploy, or during deploy with custom scripts (https://discourse.maas.io/t/custom-storage-layout-configuration-examples/5361/2), which has since been included in our docs as https://maas.io/docs/reference-maas-storage#custom-storage-layouts

I hope that's helpful, do reach out if not of course!

[Chris (undrh2o)]

Thanks for the reply - I guess what I really need is steps to move the LXD storage "default" from filesystem to ZFS on /dev/sdb - but that is an LXD question not a MAAS one.

I COULD just build the lxd machine by hand and then add it to MAAS but my other bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/2073299 is blocking that route

[Anton Troyanov (troyanov)]

Hi Chris,

As Jack mentioned, it is currently not possible to provide storage configuration for LXD Host deployed with MAAS. I will close this issue as Won't fix as there is an alternative way for a more advanced installations (via adding existing KVM host or installing LXD using custom cloud-init script)

Let's continue discussion in LP:2073299 in order to fix your issue with registering existing LXD host.