Much has changed since the last time I posted here. Some of you may remember my short lived “Download of the (sometimes every) Week” article here back when I worked at Canonical.
Back in November of last year, after over four enjoyable years at Canonical, I was approached by Eucalyptus and joined their team shortly thereafter.
For those of you not familiar with Eucalyptus, we create the most widely deployed on-premise, Infrastructure as a Service cloud platform. In simple terms, we create a piece of software that allows companies to deploy a cloud platform, similar to that provided by Amazon’s AWS offering, on their own hardware infrastructure.
Getting to the point, as the Debian/Ubuntu Release Engineer for Eucalyptus, I am happy and proud to announce our first Alpha packages for our 3.1 release.
For those familiar with Eucalyptus 2.x, the major new features are
- High Availability
- Enhanced Resource Access Control
- Improved stability
and while still a work in progress,
- Ease of installation
For those of you using Ubuntu Precise, you can grab the packages now by adding the following repository to your system:
- ppa:eucalyptus-maintainers/ppa
You will then need to run (all commands from this point on will be in italics, configuration settings and other important information in bold):
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install eucalyptus-cloud eucalyptus-cc eucalyptus-walrus eucalyptus-sc eucalyptus-nc
Before configuring your cloud, you will need to set some kernel parameters:
- sudo echo 250 128000 256 512 > /proc/sys/kernel/sem
- sudo echo 17179869184 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
- sudo echo 4194304 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall
Now, you will need to configure your cloud by editing:
- /etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf
The configuration below assumes you are going to run Eucalyptus on a network with DHCP in SYSTEM mode. For more information about the different netwroking modes Eucalyptus can be configured for, please download the following installation guide:
http://www.eucalyptus.com/sites/all/files/docs/3.0/ig.pdf
Your eucalyptus.conf file should contain the following settings for SYSTEM mode:
- EUCALYPTUS=”/”
- CLOUD_OPTS=”–db-home=/usr/lib/postgresql/9.1/ –java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java –log-level=EXTREME –debug”
- HYPERVISOR=”kvm”
- USE_VIRTIO_DISK=”1″
- USE_VIRTIO_NET=”1″
- INSTANCE_PATH=”/opt/eucalyptus/instances”
- VNET_BRIDGE=”br0″
- INSTANCE_PATH=”/var/lib/eucalyptus/instances”
You are now ready to run the Eucalyptus setup procedure which, among other things, ensures the proper permissions and ownership of certain files on your system:
- sudo euca_conf –setup
Next, the database for the Cloud Controller (CLC) needs to created. As user eucalyptus (su eucalyptus), run the following command:
- euca_conf –initialize
Lastly, before starting Eucalyptus, you will need to setup a bridge device (only needed in SYSTEM mode). Fortunately, the community has provided a good example already:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Eucalyptus%2Bbridge
For more detailed information on configuring a bridge, see:
http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html
It’s rock ‘n roll time:
- sudo service eucalyptus-cloud start
After completing the steps above, you should have a running CLC! Don’t get too excited though – there are still a few more steps before you can begin using your cloud. In order to interact with your new cloud, you must first obtain your credentials. From your home directory, or another directory of your choosing, run:
- euca_conf –get-credentials admin.zip
- unzip admin.zip
- source eucarc
You may now start the other cloud components and register their services:
- sudo euca_conf –register-walrus -H <hostname> -C walrus -P walrus
- sudo euca_conf –register-sc -H <hostname> -C SC_NAME -P PARTI00
- sudo euca_conf –register-cluster -H <hostname> -C CC_NAME -P PARTI00
- sudo service eucalyptus-cc start
- sudo euca_conf –register-nodes <hostname>
- sudo eucalyptus-nc start
Hurray cloud! You can now test to see that your cloud is functioning as it should be by running:
- euca-describe-walruses ; euca-describe-storage-controllers ; euca-describe-clusters
You should see something similar to:
WALRUS walrus walrus 192.168.51.251 ENABLED {}
STORAGECONTROLLER PARTI00 SC_NAME 192.168.51.251 ENABLED {}
CLUSTER PARTI00 CC_NAME 192.168.51.251 ENABLED {}
If you are familiar with cloud computing, you may now upload and register images, and start launching your cloud instances. If you are new to cloud computing, or even new to Eucalyptus atop Ubuntu, I suggest reading the following guide:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEC/BundlingImages9.10
Well, that’s all from me for now. I hope you enjoy testing out our new Alpha packages! If you are interested in becoming more involved with the Eucalyptus community, hop on over to:
Also, I along with members of our community, support, and engineering teams will be visiting UDS next week. We look forward to seeing you there!