Cloud Computing Virtual Appliance

This virtual appliance, being given with the PCQLinux distro, takes the pain out of deploying a cloud computing infrastructure. Most of the installation is taken care of automatically

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

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We talked about deploying a cloud computing infrastructure using Eucalyptus in our Jan 09 issue. If you read that article you must have noticed that deploying Eucalyptus is not a child's play. So, to make the deployment pain free, we've developed the PCQLinux Cloud Computing Virtual Appliance. The beauty of this appliance is that you can deploy it by just unpacking and inserting it in HyperV. The rest of the deployment, including the installation of the cloud nodes is taken care of automatically. And with the help of this appliance you can deploy your own EC2 based cloud in a couple of hours. Let's see how to use it.

Running the Appliance
The PCQLinux Cloud Computing Virtual Appliance is a HyperV appliance so it will run on both Microsoft Virtual Server and MS HyperV. It will not work with Microsoft VPC because it's a 64-bt appliance and VPC doesn't support 64-bit guests.

First copy PCQCloud.vhd.bz2 to the machine running MS HyperV. Next, unpack it using Winrar or any other uncompressing utility which supports BZip format. The final extracted .vhd file will be around 7.5 GB so please make sure you have enough disk space while uncompressing. And due to the large file size, the unzipping process might take pretty long depending on the type of processors you are using. So, I suggest you better go and grab a cup of coffee till the process gets over!

Once it has been uncompressed, start the HyperV console and create a new machine with atleast one GB of RAM and with one legacy network card. You can start the creation wizard by going to Action  New  Virtual machine. Follow the wizard and provide the necessary information required. Continue till the time you see a window which asks you for connecting the virtual hard disk. In this window, select the second option which says, 'Use an existing virtual hard disk.' Now click on the browse button and provide the path of the PCQCloud.vhd file. Continue till you reach the end of the wizard. Once the virtual machine is created, right click and select the start the option to start the machine.

Your cloud's node is now ready to rock. The appliance boots with a default IP of 192.168.3.246 and username is root and the password is pass@word1. The appliance automatically starts a DHCP server on the network, so make sure you don't run it on a live production network without disabling the DHCP server.

Installing nodes
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. Boot up all nodes and make sure they 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 some amount of 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 all the nodes are installed, reboot all your node machines. I don't know why, but I faced a lot of trouble in getting all nodes attached to the cloud till the time I rebooted all of them. Once the reboot process has been done, your EC2 enabled Eucalyptus cloud is up and running. 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 so, 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.

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 them. 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 using admin both 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 Admin page. 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 to 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

You need 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

And you are done with it. Wasn't that simple!

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