As I mentioned in my previous blog post, trying out Ganeti can be cumbersome and I went out and created a platform for testing it out using Vagrant. Now I have a PDF guide that you can use to walk through some of the basics steps of using Ganeti along with even testing a fail-over scenario. Its an updated version of a guide I wrote for OSCON last year. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
Tag Archives: virtualization
Trying out Ganeti with Vagrant
Ganeti is a very powerful tool but often times people have to look for spare hardware to try it out easily. I also wanted to have a way to easily test new features of Ganeti Web Manager (GWM) and Ganeti Instance Image without requiring additional hardware. While I do have the convenience of having access to hardware at the OSU Open Source Lab to do my testing, I’d rather not depend on that always. Sometimes I like trying new and crazier things and I’d rather not break a test cluster all the time. So I decided to see if I could use Vagrant as a tool to create a Ganeti test environment on my own workstation and laptop.
This all started last year while I was preparing for my OSCON tutorial on Ganeti and was manually creating VirtualBox VMs to deploy Ganeti nodes for the tutorial. It worked well but soon after I gave the tutorial I discovered Vagrant and decided to adapt my OSCON tutorial with Vagrant. Its a bit like the movie Inception of course, but I was able to successfully get Ganeti working with Ubuntu and KVM (technically just qemu) and mostly functional VMs inside of the nodes. I was also able to quickly create a three-node cluster to test failover with GWM and many facets of the webapp.
The vagrant setup I have has two parts:
The puppet module I wrote is very basic and isn’t really intended for production use. I plan to re-factor it in the coming months into a completely modular production ready set of modules. The node boxes are currently running Ubuntu 11.10 (I’ve been having some minor issues getting 12.04 to work), and the internal VMs you can deploy are based on the CirrOS Tiny OS. I also created several branches in the vagrant-ganeti repo for testing various versions of Ganeti which has helped the GWM team implement better support for 2.5 in the upcoming release.
To get started using Ganeti with Vagrant, you can do the following:
git clone git://github.com/ramereth/vagrant-ganeti.git git submodule update --init gem install vagrant vagrant up node1 vagrant ssh node1 gnt-cluster verify
Moving forward I plan to implement the following:
- Update tutorial documentation
- Support for Xen and LXC
- Support for CentOS and Debian as the node OS
Please check out the README for more instructions on how to use the Vagrant+Ganeti setup. If you have any feature requests please don’t hesitate to create an issue on the github repo.
Rebalancing Ganeti Clusters
One of the best features of Ganeti is its ability to grow linearly by adding new servers easily. We recently purchased a new server to expand our ever growing production cluster and needed to rebalance cluster. Adding and expanding the cluster consisted of the following steps:
- Installing the base OS on the new node
- Adding the node to your configuration management of choice and/or installing ganeti
- Add the node to the cluster with gnt-node add
- Check Ganeti using the verification action
- Use htools to rebalance the cluster
For simplicity sake I’ll cover the last three steps.
Adding the node
Assuming you’re using a secondary network, this is how you would add your node:
gnt-node add -s <secondary ip> newnode
Now lets check and make sure ganeti is happy:
gnt-cluster verify
If all is well, continue on otherwise try and resolve any issue that ganeti is complaining about.
Using htools
Make sure you install ganeti-htools on all your nodes before continuing. It requires haskell so just be aware of that requirement. Lets see what htools wants to do first:
hbal -m ganeti.example.org Loaded 5 nodes, 73 instances Group size 5 nodes, 73 instances Selected node group: default Initial check done: 0 bad nodes, 0 bad instances. Initial score: 41.00076094 Trying to minimize the CV... 1. openmrs.osuosl.org g1.osuosl.bak:g2.osuosl.bak => g5.osuosl.bak:g1.osuosl.bak 38.85990831 a=r:g5.osuosl.bak f 2. stagingvm.drupal.org g3.osuosl.bak:g1.osuosl.bak => g5.osuosl.bak:g3.osuosl.bak 36.69303985 a=r:g5.osuosl.bak f 3. scratchvm.drupal.org g2.osuosl.bak:g4.osuosl.bak => g5.osuosl.bak:g2.osuosl.bak 34.61266967 a=r:g5.osuosl.bak f <snip> 28. crisiscommons1.osuosl.org g3.osuosl.bak:g1.osuosl.bak => g3.osuosl.bak:g5.osuosl.bak 4.93089388 a=r:g5.osuosl.bak 29. crisiscommons-web.osuosl.org g2.osuosl.bak:g1.osuosl.bak => g1.osuosl.bak:g5.osuosl.bak 4.57788814 a=f r:g5.osuosl.bak 30. aqsis2.osuosl.org g1.osuosl.bak:g3.osuosl.bak => g1.osuosl.bak:g5.osuosl.bak 4.57312216 a=r:g5.osuosl.bak Cluster score improved from 41.00076094 to 4.57312216 Solution length=30
I’ve shortened the actual output for the sake of this blog post. Htools automatically calculates which virtual machines to move and how using the least amount of operations. In most these moves, the VMs may simply be migrated, migrated & secondary storage replaced, or migrated, secondary storage replaced, migrated. In our environment we needed to move 30 VMs around out of the total 70 VMs that are hosted on the cluster.
Now lets see what commands we actually would need to run:
hbal -C -m ganeti.example.org Commands to run to reach the above solution: echo jobset 1, 1 jobs echo job 1/1 gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak openmrs.osuosl.org gnt-instance migrate -f openmrs.osuosl.org echo jobset 2, 1 jobs echo job 2/1 gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak stagingvm.drupal.org gnt-instance migrate -f stagingvm.drupal.org echo jobset 3, 1 jobs echo job 3/1 gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak scratchvm.drupal.org gnt-instance migrate -f scratchvm.drupal.org <snip> echo jobset 28, 1 jobs echo job 28/1 gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak crisiscommons1.osuosl.org echo jobset 29, 1 jobs echo job 29/1 gnt-instance migrate -f crisiscommons-web.osuosl.org gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak crisiscommons-web.osuosl.org echo jobset 30, 1 jobs echo job 30/1 gnt-instance replace-disks -n g5.osuosl.bak aqsis2.osuosl.org
Here you can see the commands it wants you to execute. Now you can either put these all in a script and run them, split them up, or just run them one by one. In our case I ran them one by one just to be sure we didn’t run into any issues. I had a couple of VMs not migration properly but those were exactly fixed. I split this up into a three day migration running ten jobs a day.
The length of time that it takes to move each VM depends on the following factors:
- How fast your secondary network is
- How busy the nodes are
- How fast your disks are
Most of our VMs ranged in size from 10G to 40G in size and on average took around 10-15 minutes to complete each move. Addtionally, make sure you read the man page for hbal to see all the various features and options you can tweak. For example, you could tell hbal to just run all the commands for you which might be handy for automated rebalancing.
Conclusion
Overall the rebalancing of our cluster went without a hitch outside of a few minor issues. Ganeti made it really easy to expand our cluster with minimal to zero downtime for our hosted projects.
Networking with Ganeti
I’ve been asked quite a bit about how I do our network setup with Ganeti. I admit that it did take me a bit to figure out a sane way to do it in Gentoo. Unfortunately (at least in baselayout-1.x) bringing up VLANs with bridge interfaces in Gentoo is rather a pain. What I’m about to describe is basically a hack and there’s probably a better way to do this. I hope it gets improved in baselayout-2.x but I haven’t had a chance to take a look. Please feel free to add comments on what you feel will work better.
The key problem I ran into was dealing with starting up the vlan interfaces first, then starting up the bridged interfaces in the correct order. Here’s a peek at the network config on one of our Ganeti hosts on Gentoo:
# bring up bridge interfaces manually after eth0 is up
postup() {
local vlans="42 113"
if [ "${IFACE}" = "eth0" ] ; then
for vlan in $vlans ; do
/etc/init.d/net.br${vlan} start
if [ "${vlan}" = "113" ] ; then
# make sure the bridges get going first
sleep 10
fi
done
fi
}
# bring down bridge interfaces first
predown() {
local vlans="42 113"
if [ "${IFACE}" = "eth0" ] ; then
for vlan in $vlans ; do
/etc/init.d/net.br${vlan} stop
done
fi
}
# Setup trunked VLANs
vlans_eth0="42 113"
config_eth0=( "null" )
vconfig_eth0=( "set_name_type VLAN_PLUS_VID_NO_PAD" )
config_vlan42=( "null" )
config_vlan113=( "null" )
# Bring up primary IP on eth0 via the bridged interface
bridge_br42="vlan42"
config_br42=( "10.18.0.150 netmask 255.255.254.0" )
routes_br42=( "default gw 10.18.0.1" )
# Setup bridged VLAN interfaces
bridge_br113="vlan113"
config_br113=( "null" )
# Backend drbd network
config_eth1=( "192.168.19.136 netmask 255.255.255.0" )
The latter portion of the config its fairly normal. I setup eth0 to null, set the VLAN’s to null, then I add settings to the bridge interfaces. In our case we have the IP for the node itself on br42. The rest of the VLAN’s are just set to null. Finally we setup the backend secondary IP.
The first part of the config is the “fun stuff”. In order for this to work you need to only add net.eth0 and net.eth1 to the default enabled level. The post_up() function will start the bridge interfaces after eth0 has started and iterates through the list of vlans/bridges. Since I’m using the bridge interface as the primary host connection, I added a simple sleep at the end to let it see the traffic first.
That’s it! A fun hack that seems to work. I would love to hear feedback on this :)
Speaking at SCALE 9x
I’m going to be speaking at SCALE 9x this year and giving a session on Scalable Virtualization with Ganeti on Saturday February 26th at 6pm. I will be going over the basics of what Ganeti is and how you use it. This session will be very similar to the ones I gave last year at Open Source Bridge and LinuxCon Boston.
If you want to meet me in person and talk about what’s going on at the Open Source Lab, Supercell, Ganeti,Gentoo, or just other random stuff, feel free to! I’ll be the only person coming from the OSUOSL but I’ll be sure to represent us the best that I can.
See you at SCALE9x in a few weeks!