Installing a Cluster of Raspberry Pis with Stacki Ace

Installing a Cluster of Raspberry Pis with Stacki Ace

• 1.
  Installing a Clusterof Raspberry Pis
• 2.
  What is aRaspberry Pi? Single board computer Designed to promote teaching of computer science As of November 2016, 11 million units sold Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - $35!!
• 3.
  Raspberry Pi Stats 1.2GHz quad-core ARM 64/32 bit capable 1 GB RAM 1 MicroSD slot 4 USB ports 100 Mbit Ethernet HDMI Bluetooth Wireless LAN Audio / Composite video out Camera header Display header 40 pins of general-purpose I/O
• 4.
  Raspberry Pi Software SupportsLinux Debian (“Raspbian”) • Main software release CentOS 7.x • Only 32-bit for now Many other distributions too And now Stacki!
• 5.
  Stacki Ace The bestARM on your team is an Ace Stacki pallet for ARM • Based on Stacki 4.0 Stacki-ace pallet for ARM • Raspberry Pi specific configuration
• 6.
  Why Stacki Ace? Greatmarketing vehicle X86_64 rules the server space • But 15 billion ARMs shipped in 2015 Can install a datacenter with a $35 device Interesting new use cases • Low-cost pooled storage • IoT
• 7.
  Stacki Ace –What does it do? Converts a Raspberry Pi into a Stacki frontend Stacki Ace frontend can install: • Other Raspberry Pis (“ace” appliances) • Traditional x86_64 servers (“backend” appliances)
• 8.
  Storage Configuration Set “bootdisk”parameter • Default: mmcblk0 (the MicroSD card) • USB storage: sda Can install onto: • MicroSD card • USB-connected hard disk • USB stick Note: If you install onto a USB device, you no longer need a MicroSD card
• 9.
  Frontend Installation Login toFrontend Raspberry Pi • You’ll be asked to change your password • And your root file system will be resized to use all the space on your MicroSD card Download stacki, stacki-ace and os pallets for ARM Execute ‘frontend-install.py’: Reboot frontend-install.py -–stacki-iso=stacki-4.0_20170316-7.x.armv7hl.disk1.iso –-stacki-version=4.0 -–stacki-name=stacki
• 10.
  Raspberry Pi BackendInstallation Live Demo
• 11.
  X86_64 Backend Installation Download“os” and “stacki” pallets for x86_64 Create a new box for the x86_64 pallets Add and enable “os” and “stacki” pallets for new box Assign the x86_64 backend nodes to the box, then install # stack add box traditional # stack add pallet os-7.3_11122da-7.x.x86_64.disk1.iso stacki-4.0_20170414_c4aff2a-7.x.x86_64.disk1.iso # stack enable pallet os stacki box=traditional arch=x86_64 # stack set host box backend-0-0 box=traditional
• 12.
  Internals
• 13.
  Basic Kickstart FileProcessing Wrote a “kickstart interpreter” for CentOS ARM • No kickstart on CentOS ARM Dynamically create a valid kickstart file and send it back to the Pi • Pre • Package • Post
• 14.
  Kickstart File Processing Duringan install, NFS mount “/” from the frontend • This allows for the backend Pi to be “off” the storage so we can repartition and reformat “/boot” and “/” We configure /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf to answer Raspberry Pi DHCP requests • Which we automatically enable via “program_usb_boot_mode=1” in /boot/config.txt
• 15.
  Basic Kickstart FileProcessing On each boot, backend asks for kickstart file Looks at attributes section for “bootaction” attribute If “bootaction” == “install”, then parse and execute the kickstart file • Otherwise, do nothing
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  Future
• 17.
  Avalanche Package Installation •Benefits x86_64 too • Parallel file distribution on running hosts Storage and partitioning spreadsheets Wireless networking