Overview

This is a set of Chef cookbooks to bring up an instance of an OpenStack-based cluster of head and worker nodes. In addition to hosting virtual machines, there are a number of additional services provided with these cookbooks - such as distributed storage, DNS, log aggregation/search, and monitoring - see below for a partial list of services provided by these cookbooks.

Each head node runs all of the core services in a highly-available manner with no restriction upon how many head nodes there are. The cluster is deemed operational as long as 50%+1 of the head nodes are online. Otherwise, a network partition may occur with a split-brain scenario. In practice, we currently recommend roughly one head node per rack.

Each worker node runs the relevant services (nova-compute, Ceph OSDs, etc.). There is no limitation on the number of worker nodes. In practice, we currently recommend that the cluster should not grow to more than 200 worker nodes.

Setup

These recipes are currently intended for building a BCPC cloud on top of Ubuntu 12.04 servers using Chef 10. When setting this up in VMs, be sure to add a few dedicated disks (for ceph OSDs) aside from boot volume. In addition, it's expected that you have three separate NICs per machine, with the following as defaults (and recommendations for VM settings):

eth0 - management traffic (host-only NIC in VM)
eth1 - storage traffic (host-only NIC in VM)
eth2 - VM traffic (host-only NIC in VM)

You should look at the various settings in cookbooks/bcpc/attributes/default.rb and tweak accordingly for your setup (by adding them to an environment file).

Cluster Bootstrap

Please refer to the BCPC Bootstrap Guide for more information about getting a BCPC cluster bootstrapped.

There are provided scripts which set up a Chef and Cobbler server via Vagrant or on bare metal that permit imaging of the cluster via PXE.

Once the Chef server is set up, you can bootstrap any number of nodes to get them registered with the chef server for your environment - see the next section for enrolling the nodes.

Make a cluster

To build a new BCPC cluster, you have to start with building a single head node first. (This assumes that you have already completed the bootstrap process and have a Chef server available.) Since the recipes will automatically generate all passwords and keys for this new cluster, enable the target node as an admin in the chef server so that the recipes can write the generated info to a databag. The databag will be called configs and the databag item will be the same name as the environment (Test-Laptop in this example). You only need to leave the node as an admin for the first chef-client run. You can also manually create the databag & item (as per the example in data_bags/configs/Example.json) and manually upload it if you'd rather not bother with the whole admin thing for the first run.

So add this first node as the role BCPC-Headnode and run chef-client on the target node. After the first one is up, you can add another head node with:

 $ knife bootstrap -E Test-Laptop -r "role[BCPC-Headnode]" -x ubuntu --sudo <IPAddress>

If you get an error saying 403 "Forbidden" on the initial run, you probably forgot to make the initial headnode client an admin user:

10.0.100.11 [2013-05-18T13:23:11-04:00] FATAL: Net::HTTPServerException: ruby_block[initialize-ssh-keys] (bcpc::networking line 22) had an error: Net::HTTPServerException: 403 "Forbidden"

To enroll a server as a worker node:

 $ knife bootstrap -E Test-Laptop -r "role[BCPC-Worknode]" -x ubuntu --sudo <IPAddress>

Using a cluster

Once the nodes are configured and bootstrapped, BCPC services will be accessible via the floating IP. (For the Test-Laptop environment, it is 10.0.100.5.)

For example, you can go to https://10.0.100.5/horizon/ for the OpenStack web interface. To find the automatically-generated OpenStack credentials, look in the data bag for your environment under keystone-admin-user and keystone-admin-password:

ubuntu@bcpc-bootstrap:~$ knife data bag show configs Test-Laptop | grep keystone-admin
keystone-admin-password:       abcdefgh
keystone-admin-token:          this-is-my-token
keystone-admin-user:           admin

For example, to check on Ceph:

ubuntu@bcpc-vm1:~$ ceph -s
   health HEALTH_OK
   monmap e1: 1 mons at {bcpc-vm1=172.16.100.11:6789/0}, election epoch 2, quorum 0 bcpc-vm1
   osdmap e94: 12 osds: 12 up, 12 in
    pgmap v705: 2192 pgs: 2192 active+clean; 80333 KB data, 729 MB used, 227 GB / 227 GB avail
   mdsmap e4: 1/1/1 up {0=bcpc-vm1=up:active}

BCPC Services

BCPC currently relies upon a number of open-source packages:

Thanks to all of these communities for producing this software!