Building Your Own Cloud Computing Network

Continued from page: 1

Thursday, January 01, 2009

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Once you have download the DVD ISO and burnt it, get a machine (can be any machine with preferably one GB of RAM, P-IV and above with two network cards). Now, connect one network card with your network switch which preferably has a DHCP server and an Internet connection. We will call this the “production network.” And connect the other network card to an isolated network (preferably a Gbps network); where you are going to connect all your Cloud node machines. We shall call this is Cloud network. Make sure there is no DHCP server running on the Cloud network because Rocks frontend is going to run its own DHCP server, pre-configured for node's remote installation.

Make sure to select Rolls shown in the image while installing Rocks for your Cloud

Now put in the DVD and fire up the installation, once the boot screen comes, type “frontend” and hit enter. This will start the installation for ROCKS' management server. After a couple of booting minutes, you will see a screen which asks you to select the Rolls you want to install on the Rocks server. There are two ways of installing the rolls: one is through the DVD and the other is through the Internet. Select the CD/DVD option and you will see a page with a list of available roles. Select the rolls shown in the image in the previous page. Don't forget to specifically include the base, Xen, Java, OS and Ganglia roles.

Once you have selected the rolls, click on the Submit button and you will be redirected to the previous page. Now hit next and you will see a screen which will ask you to fill in details for creating a self certificate for the HTTPS web access of the Rocks front end. Enter your location information and proceed.

Running 'rocks list roll' will show you the list of Rolls installed. Here, check if Eucalyptus Roll is installed or not.

Once this is done, the installer will ask you standard information such as password, timezone, etc. and it will ask you how to partition the server hard drive. It is good to do a automatic partitioning to avoid any confusion. Just make sure you don't have any data on the hard disk. After gathering this information, the system will start copying the file and depending on your system resources it will take from 10 to 20 minutes to finish the install.

Adding the Eucalyptus Roll
Once the ROCKS installation is over, it is time to install the Eucalyptus Roll on the Rocks front end. For this you have to download the eucalyptus roll ISO from http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/downloads/31 and copy it to the front end system's '/' folder. Now add the eucalyptus role by running the following command:

# rocks add roll clean=1 / $eucalyptus-1.3.x86_64.disk1.iso

Now enable the roll by running the following command:

#rocks enable roll eucalyptus

Once this is done, you can check if the eucalyptus roll is installed and enabled or not, by running the following command:

# rocks list roll

This should show something like the visual above.

Now you have to modify the TFTP based remote installation of the node in such a way that when rocks does the remote installation, the eucalyptus node components also gets installed on the nodes. To do so run the following command:

# cd /home/install && rocks-dist dist

This command will take some time to run and will build the new package list for remote installation of nodes.

In the inter-ether command screen select the VM Container option to start the installation of Eucalyptus nodes.

Installing nodes
Now this is the time to install nodes over the network. For this, run the Rocks command “insert-ether” from a terminal. It will open up a window with a list of device types. Select the last option which says “vm-container” and hit enter. A blank window will open. Now boot up all the nodes and make sure they are all connect to the cloud network and their boot preference is set to Network/PXE boot. Once you do so you will start seeing entries being added to the blank window of “insert-ether”. You will see one entry each for the number of nodes you have booted.

On the nodes, the remote installation will start automatically and the complete installation will happen with any manual intervention. You can even have your nodes headless and see the installation screen remotely through a VNC client with the host name of the nodes shown in the insert-ether window.

Once the nodes have been installed with Eucalyptus client, you have to now install and configure the Eucalyptus web management interface and manager on the front end/management machine. For this run the following commands. These commands will install and configure all eucalyptus server side rpms:

#kroll eucalyptus > build.sh
#sh ./build.sh

Once this is done, reboot all your node machines. Don't know why, but I faced a lot of trouble getting all nodes attached to the cloud till the time I rebooted all of them once. Once the reboot process has been done, you can say your EC2 enabled Eucalyptus cloud is up and running. Now this is the time to start using it.

Adding images
Now your cluster is ready but you need some virtual machines to run on top of it. For doing this, you have to upload some Linux OS images to it. For getting your hands dirty, you can use a very tiny Linux image which is available from Eucalyptus' website. You can download it from http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/releases/euca-ttylinux.tgz. once downloaded, untar and unzip it and run the following command:

#/opt/eucalyptus/usr/sbin/euca add_image --disk-image ttylinux.img --kernel-image vmlinuz-2.6.16.33-xen --image-name ttylinux

And the image will be updated to the cloud.

Once your nodes start booting up you will see them getting registered in this window one after the other.

Using the Cloud with Amazon's EC2 client
If you are comfortable with Amazon's EC2 client then you can just skip this section. But if you are not, then read on. To start with, first get a client machine, any Windows or Linux machine will do. But the process will vary a bit. We did it on a Linux machine.

First download Amazon's EC2 toolset and APIs from http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools-1.3-24159.zip. Now unzip it. But before using the commands first generate and download a certificate for your cloud's account, so that you can authenticate the machine from the system that is running the EC2 client. To do so, open the following link:

https://ip.of.the.cloud.front.end:8443

Change “ip.of.the.cloud. front. end” with the IP or FQDN of the Cloud's frontend. A login page will appear. Login through it using admin as username and password. Once you login for the first time to the Eucalyptus page, you will be asked to change the Admin password. Change it and proceed and you will see the admn page. Now from here, you can add more users and then login through them to get the certificate or you can just download the Admin's certificate to get started. To download the Admin's certificate, click on “Generate Certificate” button on the page. It will download a zipped file. Once downloaded, unzip it to ~/.euca folder.

Now move EC2 Tools folder to opt and run the following commands to register the EC2 and certificate paths, and the cloud's website:

export EC2_HOME=/opt/ec2-api-tools-1.3-24159
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.euca/euca2-*-pk.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.euca/euca2-*-cert.pem
export EC2_URL=http:// ip.of.the.cloud.front.end:8773/services/Eucalyptus

Now, you will be able to run the following command to see how many cores you have in your cloud and how many are free for you:

#ec2-describe-availability-zones

Now you have to create a private key, so that you can use it to connect to an instance when you run them, through SSH. To do so, run:

ec2-add-keypair key >> key.private

Now run the following command to get the EMI identifier for the image/s you have added:

#ec2-describe-images

It will return a value like emi-xxxxxxx. Now run the following command to start instances of the image on the cloud:

#ec2-run-instances emi-xxxxxxx -k key

And the linux image will boot up on the cloud. You can access it through SSH. But for that you will need its IP which you can get by running the following command:

#ec2-describe-instances

To connect to the image using SSH and the private key you just created, run the following command:

ssh -i key.private root@ip-addresses-of-the-image

This screen shows that our 'Cloud' is Up with all 24 cores out of the 24 available free.

And you are done. In case you still have any doubts or want to provide your feedback on this article, please visit http://forums. pcquest.com, a 3 lakh strong community of techies, constantly discussing new tech and services.

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