Support for LXD remotes / migration of instances to remotes

[vosdev]

The UI currently has no support for remotes. (LXD remotes, not simplestreams like requested in #410)

I understand that completely managing a remote like requested in #632 is too much work and simply opening the UI of the remote would be easier. I'm only requesting the configuration of remotes and migration of instances between.

lxc remote ls
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
|         NAME         |                        URL                        |   PROTOCOL    |  AUTH TYPE  | PUBLIC | STATIC | GLOBAL |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| cloud                | https://192.168.3.61:8443                         | lxd           | tls         | NO     | NO     | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| images               | https://images.lxd.canonical.com                  | simplestreams | none        | YES    | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| local (current)      | unix://                                           | lxd           | file access | NO     | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| ubuntu               | https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/         | simplestreams | none        | YES    | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| ubuntu-daily         | https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/            | simplestreams | none        | YES    | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| ubuntu-minimal       | https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/minimal/releases/ | simplestreams | none        | YES    | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
| ubuntu-minimal-daily | https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/minimal/daily/    | simplestreams | none        | YES    | YES    | NO     |
+----------------------+---------------------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+

Trust

I would like to request the feature to be able to add/configure remotes in the UI so that we can migrate instances between separate lxd nodes/clusters like we can through the CLI.

lxc remote add [<remote>] <IP|FQDN|URL|token> [flags]

Trust identities

The creation of identities is already present in the UI, but the identity I created in the UI did not work for a remote trust.

Through the CLI I executed on my LXD cluster

lxc config trust add
<enter name>
<outputs a generated  token>

I was able to add a remote on my standalone node like so: lxc remote add cloud <token generated via cli on LXD cluster> and it worked.

Then I tried to replicate these steps with what is available in the UI, so I created a TLS trust identity through the UI. I entered a name and clicked Create Identity. I copied the token and tried to replicate my steps lxc remote add cloud2 <token generated via UI on LXD cluster> and it gets rejected with a Error: Identity name must be provided

inspecting the identities (lxc auth identity show <name>) I see that the CLI generated identity has a tls_certificate and the UI does not. The identity created through the CLI shows up under lxc config trust ls and the UI identity does not.

Migration

The main goal of this feature request is the ability to migrate instances to other remotes

Example of moving my instance test/bla to my cloud remote lxd cluster as default/bla, (Optionally removing the profiles because the target doesn't match the profiles of my standalone lxd node):

lxc move bla --project test cloud:bla --target-project default --no-profiles

[vosdev]

Sidenote related to identities.. the lxc config trust I created is unmanagable in the UI, but it's not hidden with the default filter to hide system-identities. Would it make sense to hide these type of identities by default as well since they cannot be managed anyways?

/ui/permissions/identities?system-identities=hide

[edlerd]

Thanks for raising the request, we indeed have this feature in the pipeline. There is even a draft pr open in the ui. Though we took this back to the design phase as we discovered some issues with the current approach of replication and scheduling those. But we sure will continue to work on this, and it should be available in the future.

[edlerd]

Sidenote related to identities.. the lxc config trust I created is unmanagable in the UI, but it's not hidden with the default filter to hide system-identities. Would it make sense to hide these type of identities by default as well since they cannot be managed anyways?

This is still a user identity, not an internal one. Hence, even though it is not manageable in the UI I think the current behavior is correct.

[vosdev]

Thanks for raising the request, we indeed have this feature in the pipeline. There is even a draft pr open in the ui. Though we took this back to the design phase as we discovered some issues with the current approach of replication and scheduling those. But we sure will continue to work on this, and it should be available in the future.

Aahh I've seen it (And the PR it depends on on the lxd repo) but thought this was some kind of new feature (cluster links) because I always called them remotes. Already thought there was a lot of overlap haha.

Either way for now I will resort back to the CLI for migrating between clusters/nodes :)

Still looking forward to the cluster link feature because of the replication/backup mechanics it is supposed to bring! That's a crucial feature for us to completely drop Proxmox and go full-on LXD. Snapshots are nice/automated but having a complete backup solution is still missing.

Thanks for the reply :)