trayla / ssp

This repository serves you with an automation routine to deploy virtualisation platform on a single server base. It starts with a plain Ubuntu server and ends with a working setup of KVM virtualisation. This is almost done by Linux shell scripts and Ansible playbooks.

SSP - Single Server Platform

Note: The master branch may be in an unstable or even broken state during development. Please use releases instead of the master branch in order to get a stable set of binaries.

Prerequisits

Hardware requirements

• A running bare metal machine with a plain Ubuntu 20.04 Server installation and root access (virtual machines are not supported)
• Minimum 16 GB RAM (minimum 8 GB with slightly modified parameters)

Knowledge

• An understanding of Linux based system management and command line tools
• An understanding of virtualization with KVM

Necessary preliminaries

Storage

Your system has to provide one directory which will be used as a KVM storage pool and therefore populated with disk images for the upcoming virtual machines.

/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

Install scripts

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

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

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.

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

Install the platform with the following command. Replace the storage devices /dev/sdx1 and /dev/sdy1 with the devices of your choice.

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

Install further virtual machines with the following command:

sudo /opt/mgmt/ssp/platform.sh add-vm <vmname> <ipsuffix> <ram> <cpus> <storagesize>
sudo /opt/mgmt/ssp/platform.sh add-vm test1 10 4096 1 30G

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 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:

Edit

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%ssp")

ssh sysadm@<ipaddr>

console

Purpose: Management machine

IP Address: XX.ZZ.YY.2