Fa67 / ssp

This repository serves you with an automation routine to deploy a comprehensive operation platform on a single server base. It starts with a plain Ubuntu 18.04 server and ends with a working setup of KVM virtualization, a Gluster based storage cluster and a Kubernetes cluster. This is almost done by Ansible playbooks.

SSP - Single Server Platform

Prerequisits

Hardware requirements

• A running bare metal machine with a plain Ubuntu 18.04 Server installation and root access (virtual machines are not supported)
• Minimum 16 GB RAM (minimum 8 GB with slightly modified parameters)
• Minimum 1 TB storage (minimum 150 GB with slightly modified parameters)

Knowledge

• A understanding of Linux based system management and command line tools
• A understanding of virtualization with KVM
• Knowledge about operating a Kubernetes platform
• A basic understanding about Gluster

Necessary preliminaries

Storage

Your system has to provide three directories which will be used as KVM storage pools and therefore populated with disk images for the upcoming virtual machines. The following directories have to be create prior to the start of the installation procedure.

/vmpool

This directory is going to be used as the default storage pool for all virtual machine images except the data images. For redundancy reasons it is recommended to store this directory at least on a RAID 1 device.

Create the directory of the default storage pool:

mkdir -p /vmpool

/data/data1 and /data/data2

These directories are going to be used as redundancy nodes for the storage cluster and should be on seperate storage disks. Using a high available disk setup like RAID 1 or 5 is not necessary here due to the redenundany of the upcoming storage cluster.

Create the directories of the data storage pools:

mkdir -p /data/data1
mkdir -p /data/data2

A sudo user for system administration

Create a system administrator user and disable root

adduser -u 999 sysadm
usermod -aG sudo sysadm
passwd -l root

Install scripts

In order to execute the scripts you have to clone this GitHub repository to your server into the directory /opt/mgmt/ssp-base by issuing the following commands:

mkdir -p /opt/mgmt/ssp
git clone https://github.com/trayla/ssp.git /opt/mgmt/ssp
chown -R sysadm:sysadm /opt/mgmt

The values file defines specific customizations of your own topology. A sample file is included in this repository. It should be copied to /opt/mgmt and customized before further installation.

cp /opt/mgmt/ssp/values-default.yaml /opt/mgmt/values-ssp.yaml

Domain

The Single Server Platform provides a lot of services to the outside world. In order to access these services we are registering them as sub domains of a configurable main domain. The most comfortable way is to have a main domain like 'example.com' which points to your platform IP address by a wildcard DNS entry like this '*.example.com > 88.77.66.55'. In this case the platform can route any subdomain to the desired service by itself.

Usage

Prepare your host with the following command. This is necessary only once while you can install and remove the platform from your host as much as you like. During this process you have to accept the licence agreement of the Ansible product suite.

sudo /opt/mgmt/ssp/platform.sh prepare

Install the platform with the following command:

sudo /opt/mgmt/ssp/platform.sh install

This command removes the whole plattform from your host:

sudo /opt/mgmt/ssp/platform.sh remove

After completion the system will be restarted. It takes a couple minutes of until all virtual machines and services are up an running.

Result

If everything worked as expected you should have the following setting on your machine.

Architectural Overview

This picture shows an architectural overview of the desired platform:

Virtual machines:

The virtual machines are available through the KVM standard command line tools:

• virsh list --all lists all virtual machines
• virsh pool-list --all lists all storage pools
• virsh pool-info <poolname> shows the details of the desired storage pool
• virsh --help shows all available commands of the virtual machine management

You can gain shell access to the desired virtual machine either by opening a KVM console

virsh console <vmname>

or by connection to the virtual machine over SSH (password is "pw")

ssh sysadm@<ipaddr>

console

Purpose: Management machine

IP Address: XX.ZZ.YY.1

kubemaster

Purpose: Kubernetes master

IP Address: XX.YY.ZZ.10

kubenode1

Purpose: First Kubernetes worker node with data storage

IP Address: XX.YY.ZZ.11

kubenode2

Purpose: Second Kubernetes worker node with data storage

IP Address: XX.YY.ZZ.12