path: root/README

INTRODUCTION
============

Autocluster is set of scripts for building virtual clusters to test
clustered Samba.  It uses Linux's libvirt and KVM virtualisation
engine.

Autocluster is a collection of scripts, template and configuration
files that allow you to create a cluster of virtual nodes very
quickly.  You can create a cluster from scratch in less than 30
minutes.  Once you have a base image you can then recreate a cluster
or create new virtual clusters in minutes.

The current implementation creates virtual clusters of RHEL5 nodes.


CONTENTS
========

* INSTALLING AUTOCLUSTER

* HOST MACHINE SETUP

* CREATING A CLUSTER

* BOOTING A CLUSTER

* POST-CREATION SETUP

* CONFIGURATION

* DEVELOPMENT HINTS


INSTALLING AUTOCLUSTER
======================

Before you start, make sure you have the latest version of
autocluster. To download autocluster do this:

  git clone git://git.samba.org/tridge/autocluster.git autocluster

Or to update it, run "git pull" in the autocluster directory

You probably want to add the directory where autocluster is installed
to your PATH, otherwise things may quickly become tedious.


HOST MACHINE SETUP
==================

This section explains how to setup a host machine to run virtual
clusters generated by autocluster.


 1) Install kvm, libvirt, qemu-nbd, nbd-client and expect.

    Autocluster creates virtual machines that use libvirt to run under
    KVM.  This means that you will need to install both KVM and
    libvirt on your host machine.  You will also need the qemu-nbd and
    nbd-client programs, which autocluster uses to loopback-nbd-mount
    the disk images when configuring each node.  Expect is used by the
    "waitfor" script and should be available for installation form
    your distribution.

    For various distros:

    * RHEL/CentOS

      For RHEL5/CentOS5, useful packages for both kvm and libvirt can
      be found here:

        http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/centos/5/x86_64/

      You will need to install a matching kmod-kvm package to get the
      kernel module.

      RHEL5.4 ships with KVM but it doesn't have the SCSI disk
      emulation that autocluster uses by default.  There are also
      problems when autocluster uses virtio on RHEL5.4's KVM.  You
      should use a version from lfarkas.org instead.  Hopefully this
      will change!

      qemu-nbd is in the kvm package.

      Unless you can find an RPM for nbd-client then you need to
      download source from:
 
        http://sourceforge.net/projects/nbd/

      and build it.

    * Fedora Core

      Useful packages ship with Fedora Core 10 (Cambridge) and later.

      qemu-nbd is in the kvm package.

      nbd-client is in the nbd package.

    * Ubuntu

      Useful packages ship with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and later.

      qemu-nbd is in the kvm package but is called kvm-nbd, so you
      need to set the QEMU_NBD configuration variable.

      nbd-client is in the nbd-client package.

    For other distributions you'll have to backport distro sources or
    compile from upstream source as described below.

    * For KVM see the "Downloads" and "Code" sections at:

        http://www.linux-kvm.org/

    * For libvirt see:

        http://libvirt.org/

    * As mentioned about, nbd can be found at:

        http://sourceforge.net/projects/nbd/

    You will need to add the autocluster directory to your PATH.

    You will need to configure the right kvm networking setup. The
    files in host_setup/etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/ should help. This
    command will install the right networks for kvm:

       rsync -av --delete host_setup/etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/ /etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/

    After this you might need to reload libvirt:

      /etc/init.d/libvirt reload

    or similar.

    You might also need to set:

      VIRSH_DEFAULT_CONNECT_URI=qemu:///system

    in your environment so that virsh does KVM/QEMU things by default.

 2) You need a caching web proxy on your local network. If you don't
    have one, then install a squid proxy on your host. See
    host_setup/etc/squid/squid.conf for a sample config suitable for a
    virtual cluster. Make sure it caches large objects and has plenty
    of space. This will be needed to make downloading all the RPMs to
    each client sane

    To test your squid setup, run a command like this:

      http_proxy=http://10.0.0.1:3128/ wget <some-url>

    Check your firewall setup.  If you have problems accessing the
    proxy from your nodes (including from kickstart postinstall) then
    check it again!  Some distributions install nice "convenient"
    firewalls by default that might block access to the squid port
    from the nodes.  On a current version of Fedora Core you may be
    able to run system-config-firewall-tui to reconfigure the
    firewall.

 3) Setup a DNS server on your host. See host_setup/etc/bind/ for a
    sample config that is suitable. It needs to redirect DNS queries
    for your virtual domain to your windows domain controller

 4) Download a RHEL install ISO.


CREATING A CLUSTER
==================

A cluster comprises a single base disk image, a copy-on-write disk
image for each node and some XML files that tell libvirt about each
node's virtual hardware configuration.  The copy-on-write disk images
save a lot of disk space on the host machine because they each use the
base disk image - without them the disk image for each cluster node
would need to contain the entire RHEL install.

The cluster creation process can be broken down into 2 mains steps:

 1) Creating the base disk image.

 2) Create the per-node disk images and corresponding XML files.

However, before you do this you will need to create a configuration
file.  See the "CONFIGURATION" section below for more details.

Here are more details on the "create cluster" process.  Note that
unless you have done something extra special then you'll need to run
all of this as root.

 1) Create the base disk image using:

      ./autocluster create base

    The first thing this step does is to check that it can connect to
    the YUM server.  If this fails make sure that there are no
    firewalls blocking your access to the server.

    The install will take about 10 to 15 minutes and you will see the
    packages installing in your terminal

    The installation process uses kickstart.  If your configuration
    uses a SoFS release then the last stage of the kickstart
    configuration will be a postinstall script that installs and
    configures packages related to SoFS.  The choice of postinstall
    script is set using the POSTINSTALL_TEMPLATE variable, allowing you
    to adapt the installation process for different types of clusters.

    It makes sense to install packages that will be common to all
    nodes into the base image.  This save time later when you're
    setting up the cluster nodes.  However, you don't have to do this
    - you can set POSTINSTALL_TEMPLATE to "" instead - but then you
    will lose the quick cluster creation/setup that is a major feature
    of autocluster.

    When that has finished you should mark that base image immutable
    like this:

      chattr +i /virtual/ac-base.img

    That will ensure it won't change. This is a precaution as the
    image will be used as a basis file for the per-node images, and if
    it changes your cluster will become corrupt

 2) Now run "autocluster create cluster" specifying a cluster
    name. For example:

      autocluster create cluster c1

    This will create and install the XML node descriptions and the
    disk images for your cluster nodes, and any other nodes you have
    configured.  Each disk image is initially created as an "empty"
    copy-on-write image, which is linked to the base image.  Those
    images are then loopback-nbd-mounted and populated with system
    configuration files and other potentially useful things (such as
    scripts).


BOOTING A CLUSTER
=================

At this point the cluster has been created but isn't yet running.
Autocluster provides a command called "vircmd", which is a thin
wrapper around libvirt's virsh command.  vircmd takes a cluster name
instead of a node/domain name and runs the requested command on all
nodes in the cluster.

 1) Now boot your cluster nodes like this:

      vircmd start c1

    The most useful vircmd commands are:
 
      start    : boot a node
      shutdown : graceful shutdown of a node
      destroy  : power off a node immediately

 2) You can watch boot progress like this:

       tail -f /var/log/kvm/serial.c1*

    All the nodes have serial consoles, making it easier to capture
    kernel panic messages and watch the nodes via ssh


POST-CREATION SETUP
===================

Now you have a cluster of nodes, which might have a variety of
packages installed and configured in a common way.  Now that the
cluster is up and running you might need to configure specialised
subsystems like GPFS or Samba.  You can do this by hand or use the
sample scripts/configurations that are provided

 1)  Now you can ssh into your nodes. You may like to look at the
     small set of scripts in /root/scripts on the nodes for
     some scripts. In particular:

       mknsd.sh           :  sets up the local shared disks as GPFS NSDs
       setup_gpfs.sh      :  sets up GPFS, creates a filesystem etc
       setup_samba.sh     :  sets up Samba and many other system compoents
       setup_tsm_server.sh:  run this on the TSM node to setup the TSM server
       setup_tsm_client.sh:  run this on the GPFS nodes to setup HSM

     To setup a SoFS system you will normally need to run
     setup_gpfs.sh and setup_samba.sh.

 2)  If using the SoFS GUI, then you may want to lower the memory it
     uses so that it fits easily on the first node. Just edit this
     file on the first node:

       /opt/IBM/sofs/conf/overrides/sofs.javaopt

 3)  For automating the SoFS GUI, you may wish to install the iMacros
     extension to firefox, and look at some sample macros I have put
     in the imacros/ directory of autocluster. They will need editing
     for your environment, but they should give you some hints on how
     to automate the final GUI stage of the installation of a SoFS
     cluster. 


CONFIGURATION
=============

Basics
======

Autocluster uses configuration files containing Unix shell style
variables.  For example,

  FIRSTIP=30

indicates that the last octet of the first IP address in the cluster
will be 30.  If an option contains multiple words then they will be
separated by underscores ('_'), as in:

  ISO_DIR=/data/ISOs

All options have an equivalent command-line option, such
as:

  --firstip=30

Command-line options are lowercase.  Words are separated by dashes
('-'), as in:

  --iso-dir=/data/ISOs

Normally you would use a configuration file with variables so that you
can repeat steps easily.  The command-line equivalents are useful for
trying things out without resorting to an editor.  You can specify a
configuration file to use on the autocluster command-line using the -c
option.  For example:

  autocluster -c config-foo create base

If you don't provide a configuration variable then autocluster will
look for a file called "config" in the current directory.

You can also use environment variables to override the default values
of configuration variables.  However, both command-line options and
configuration file entries will override environment variables.

Potentially useful information:

* Use "autocluster --help" to list all available command-line options
  - all the items listed under "configuration options:" are the
  equivalents of the settings for config files.  This output also
  shows descriptions of the options.

* You can use the --dump option to check the current value of
  configuration variables.  This is most useful when used in
  combination with grep:

    autocluster --dump | grep ISO_DIR

  In the past we recommended using --dump to create initial
  configuration file.  Don't do this - it is a bad idea!  There are a
  lot of options and you'll create a huge file that you don't
  understand and can't debug!

* Configuration options are defined in config.d/*.defconf.  You
  shouldn't need to look in these files... but sometimes they contain
  comments about options that are too long to fit into help strings.

Keep it simple
==============

* I recommend that you aim for the smallest possible configuration file.
  Perhaps start with:

    FIRSTIP=<whatever>

  and move on from there.

* Use the --with-release option on the command-line or the
  with_release function in a configuration file to get default values
  for building virtual clusters for releases of particular "products".
  Currently there are only release definitions for SoFS.  

  For example, you can setup default values for SoFS-1.5.3 by running:

    autocluster --with-release=SoFS-1.5.3 ...

  Equivalently you can use the following syntax in a configuration
  file:

    with_release "SoFS-1.5.3"

  So the smallest possible config file would have something like this
  as the first line and would then set FIRSTIP:

    with_release "SoFS-1.5.3"

    FIRSTIP=<whatever>

  Add other options as you need them.

  The release definitions are stored in releases/*.release.  The
  available releases are listed in the output of "autocluster --help".

  NOTE: Occasionally you will need to consider the position of
  with_release in your configuration.  If you want to override options
  handled by a release definition then you will obviously need to set
  them later in your configuration.  This will be the case for most
  options you will want to set.  However, some options will need to
  appear before with_release so that they can be used within a release
  definition - the most obvious one is the (rarely used) RHEL_ARCH
  option, which is used in the default ISO setting for each release.
  If things don't work as expected use --dump to confirm that
  configuration variables have the values that you expect.

* The NODES configuration variable controls the types of nodes that
  are created.  At the time of writing, the default value is:

    NODES="rhel_base:0-3"

  This means that you get 4 nodes, at IP offsets 0, 1, 2, & 3 from
  FIRSTIP, all part of the CTDB cluster.  That is, with standard
  settings and FIRSTIP=35, 4 nodes will be created in the IP range
  10.0.0.35 to 10.0.0.38.

  The SoFS releases use a default of:

    NODES="tsm_server:0 sofs_gui:1 sofs_front:2-4"

  which should produce a set of nodes the same as the old SoFS
  default.  You can add extra rhel_base nodes if you need them for
  test clients or some other purpose:

    NODES="$NODES rhel_base:7,8"

  This produces an additional 2 base RHEL nodes at IP offsets 7 & 8
  from FIRSTIP.  Since sofs_* nodes are present, these base nodes will
  not be part of the CTDB cluster - they're just extra.

  For many standard use cases the nodes specified by NODES can be
  modified by setting NUMNODES, WITH_SOFS_GUI and WITH_TSM_NODE.
  However, these options can't be used to create nodes without
  specifying IP offsets - except WITH_TSM_NODE, which checks to see if
  IP offset 0 is vacant.  Therefore, for many uses you can ignore the
  NODES variable.

  However, NODES is the recommended mechanism for specifying the nodes
  that you want in your cluster.  It is powerful, easy to read and
  centralises the information in a single line of your configuration
  file.

DEVELOPMENT HINTS
=================

The -e option provides support for executing arbitrary bash code.
This is useful for testing and debugging.

One good use of this option is to test template substitution using the
function substitute_vars().  For example:

  ./autocluster --with-release=SoFS-1.5.3 -e 'CLUSTER=foo; DISK=foo.qcow2; UUID=abcdef; NAME=foon1; set_macaddrs; substitute_vars templates/node.xml'

This prints templates/node.xml with all appropriate substitutions
done.  Some internal variables (e.g. CLUSTER, DISK, UUID, NAME) are
given fairly arbitrary values but the various MAC address strings are
set using the function set_macaddrs().

The -e option is also useful when writing scripts that use
autocluster.  Given the complexities of the configuration system you
probably don't want to parse configuration files yourself to determine
the current settings.  Instead, you can ask autocluster to tell you
useful pieces of information.  For example, say you want to script
creating a base disk image and you want to ensure the image is
marked immutable:

  base_image=$(autocluster -c $CONFIG -e 'echo $VIRTBASE/$BASENAME.img')
  chattr -V -i "$base_image"

  if autocluster -c $CONFIG create base ; then
    chattr -V +i "$base_image"
    ...

Note that the command that autocluster should run is enclosed in
single quotes.  This means that $VIRTBASE and $BASENAME will be expand
within autocluster after the configuration file has been loaded.