Home > Communication Service Provider Solutions > Telecom Multicloud Foundation > Canonical > Guides > Reference Architecture—Canonical Charmed OpenStack (Ussuri) on Dell EMC Hardware > The node life cycle
Each machine, or “node”, managed by MAAS goes through a life cycle—from “New” to “Ready” and in the end to “Deployed” state. There are also special statuses as “Broken”, “Commissioning”, “Deploying”, “Testing” and “Allocated”.
New machines that PXE-boot on a MAAS network will be enlisted automatically if MAAS can detect their BMC parameters. During the Enlistment phase, MAAS will ensure that it can control the power status of the machine through its BMC. Another option is to add machines through the API or UI by supplying BMC credentials.
In the Commissioning phase, MAAS collects all data about the machine, which includes detailed hardware inventory like CPU model, memory setup, disks, and chipsets. It also collects information about network connectivity. This information can later be used in deployments. In this phase, it is possible to apply custom commissioning scripts that can update firmware, configure hardware RAID, and so on.
The example node’s representation by MAAS at the end of commissioning will look like the following:
A machine that is successfully commissioned is considered “Ready”. A “Ready” machine has configured BMC credentials (on IPMI/Redfish based BMCs) for ongoing power control and ensures that MAAS can start or stop the machine and allocate or redeploy it with a fresh operating system.
“Ready” machines can be Allocated to users, who can configure a network interface, bonding and addressing, as well as disks, such as LVM, RAID, bcache, or partitioning.
Users can request that MAAS turns the machine on and installs a complete operating system from scratch without any manual intervention, configuring network interfaces, disk partitions, and more.
When a user has finished with the machine, they can release it back to the shared pool of capacity. You can request MAAS to verify that there is a full disk-wipe of the machine when that happens.