Thread: Kusu Quickstart Guide

Creating an Installer Node

The first step in creating a Kusu cluster is to build an installer node. The Kusu Installer node provisions all other nodes in a cluster and runs all of the cluster services so without an Installer node the cluster does not work. Before you start you will need the following:

• The latest Kusu iso from Download Section
  
• Fedora Core 6 or CentOS 5 iso from Fedora Project or www.centos.org - The Community ENTerprise Operating System
  
• A machine with at least 512Mb of ram (1Gb recommended) and 40Gb of hard disk space (the larger the disk the better).
  
• A minimum of two ethernet network interfaces on the machine.
• The machine must also have a DVD drive.
• The Kusu iso is quite small and should fit on a single CD. Fedora Core 6 or CentOS 5 are quite large, we recommend you download the DVD iso for FC6 or CentOS 5.

Once you have downloaded the above files burn Kusu to CD and FC6 or CentOS to DVD.
Starting the Install

Installation is actually pretty simple but it is a bit slow, due to the fact that Kusu copies the entire FC6 or CentOS DVD to the installer node (approximately 4.5Gb!).

To install do the following:

• Insert the Kusu CD into the spare machine.
• Turn on the machine and you should see the following splash screen.

• Press enter and the installation will proceed.
• After a few moments the installer will start and you will see the first Welcome screen:

• Choose Next and proceed to the 'Language' Screen then choose a language.
• When you choose Next the install will proceed to the Configure Networks screen.

• Two network cards should be detected, configure one of the network cards to be the provision network and the other to be the public network. Take some time to think about how you want to configure your networks. One interface must be a provision interface. All nodes in your cluster will be provisioned from the provision network - that network interface will listen for PXE requests from new nodes and nodes that have rebooted. You can choose any IP address you like (or just keep the default) for the provision network since it is a private network not visible to the internet or corporate network. The public network interface must have a static IP address and is connected to the internet or to the corporate network. So as you can see the default configuration for a Kusu cluster is a standard Beowulf cluster.

Detailed network configuration screen:

• Next is the DNS and Default Gateway configuration screen. The Default Gateway is your default gateway IP address on the corporate network or the internet. If you don't know the IP address of your default gateway ask to your network administrator. The DNS server setting is also very important to ensure proper name resolution in the cluster and proper forwarding of name resolution requests to the DNS server at your company or internet provider. Once again if you don't know your DNS server IP address you should ask your network administrator. If you have additional DNS servers at your site you can enter them in the Optional DNS server fields. If you mess up these settings and put in the wrong IP addresses your cluster will still work but it will not be able to talk to the 'outside world' or resolve names to IP addresses properly.
• The next screen allows you to configure the host name and domain for your cluster. This host name is the name of your cluster on the public network. The domain field is the domain for all nodes in the cluster, so it is the domain used to name all nodes provisioned on the provision network, for example:

Code:

hostname=fred01domain=kusu.org

• Now assume your corporate network domain is corp.com then to access the cluster you would ssh to it with the following command:

Code:

# ssh fred01.corp.com

• And every node that you add to your new cluster will belong to the new domain kusu.org configured on the host name screen. for example, node001 will have the following fully qualified name:

Code:

node001.kusu.org

• You may need to contact your Administrator again to determine the public host name for your cluster. The internal cluster domain can be anything you like except the same domain as your company and or internet provider i.e. in the example above, choosing corp.com for the cluster domain is not a good idea.
• The next two screens are very simple, in the first screen you choose the timezone for your cluster and the ntp server for time syncronization. In the second screen you choose the root password for the cluster.
• The next step in configuring the Installer node is to partition the hard disks. Kusu will automatically detect all hard disks on the installer node, not just the first disk on the node. Partitioning the installer node can be quite complex so we recommend choosing the Use Default option for partitioning the disks until you are very familiar with Kusu and know exactly what partitions are needed for a successful install.
• If you chose Use Default you will be presented with a screen that has several preset partitions.
• The partitioner automatically creates several partitions on the disk they are:

Code:

VolGroup00
          /depot        # logical partition for OS repositories 
          /             # the rest of the filesystem 
                        # containing all tools, commands etc...

ext3      /boot         # Linux boot partition
linux-swap              # swap partition
phys_vol VolGroup00     # The physical partition for     
                        # VolGroup00 logical partition

• The VolGroup00 logical volume partition contains the rest of the installer node filesystem. The / and /depot. As mentioned before partitioning can be pretty complex, thus we recommend that you don't change the defaults if you are trying Kusu for the first time.

• Choose Next from the Partition Screen and a confirmation screen will appear listing the tasks that will be performed on the installer node if you choose Next the Kusu installer will proceed and ask if it is okay to format the disks. If you choose yes to this confirmation the installer will format the disks on the node. This can take some time if you have very large disks on the node.

• Once partitioning the disks has completed the installer will move on to the Kits screen. By default the Base kit is always added to a Kusu cluster. The Base kit contains all of the tools and utilities needed by Kusu for managing the cluster. The Base kit is necessary for a cluster but it is not sufficient on its own, a Operating System kit is needed for a successful Kusu install, thus choose Add from the kit selection screen to add the Fedora 6 Operating System kit to Kusu. Add will eject the Kusu CD, just insert the Fedora 6 DVD wait until the DVD spins up and choose OK to proceed. The installer will detect the Fedora 6 Kit and add it to the list of kits. Adding the Operating System Kit will take quite a while (it is about 4.5Gb) so this is a good time to go and get a coffee.

Once the Operating System kit is added you will see it on the Kits screen, choose Next to proceed and the installer will create the repository and install the Installer Node using Anaconda. At this point the installation is pretty automated. You should see a standard Fedora text based install. Once the Fedora installation completes the machine will reboot. Before the machine reboots remove the Fedora 6 DVD from the node - if you forget to do this when the machine reboots it will try to install Fedora possibly overwriting your Kusu install.

Congratulations - once the machine finishes rebooting you now have a Kusu installer node!! Login using the root password and have fun.Kusu