Quattor system administration toolkit is a powerful set of tools for the automated installation, configuration, and management of clusters and clouds. It is developed as a community effort and provided as open-source software. Quattor was originally developed to manage grid cluster but now it is being used to manage multiple separate infrastructures spread across Europe. In this talk we will present an overview of the new OpenNebula Quattor module developed by UGent team. We will explain how with this tool cloud administrators will be able to automate OpenNebula deployments and their cloud infrastructure including databases, Ceph backends and hypervisors. We will describe the technical details and the features included in the new module. We will also describe the OpenNebula Quattor automated installation infrastructure (AII). This framework is responsible for translating automatically the configuration parameters of a physical machine into installation instructions suitable to be used by an OpenNebula RPC endpoint to convert a “real” server into a VM appliance. Author Biography Álvaro Simón is a HPC System Administrator at Ghent University in Belgium. He has been involved in European Grid and Cloud projects since 2006 like EGEE or as task leader for EGI Federated Cloud. Currently he is working with UGent HPC team to deploy a new cloud infrastructure for Ghent University. He is also collaborating with Quattor system administration toolkit community developing the OpenNebula configuration module.

1. OpenNebula
automated deployments
With
Quattor
Álvaro Simón, Stijn De Weirdt
HPC UGent, Ghent University, Belgium
hpc-admin@lists.ugent.be
OpenNebula Conference – 21st October 2015 Barcelona

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Outline
● What is Quattor?
● OpenNebula Component
● OpenNebula aii
● Future work
● Links

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What is Quattor?
●
A powerful system administration toolkit for the
automated installation and management of
clusters.
●
It was originally developed in the framework of
European Data Grid project (2001-2004).
●
Since its first release it has been maintained and
extended by a volunteer community and sys
admins.

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Some features:
●
It provides a powerful set of tools to manage the complete
lifecycle of systems.
●
Flexible, as much or as little as you want.
●
The Quattor information model is based on the distinction
between the desired state and the actual state.
●
Federated management, it permits to share the
management of distributed resources and institutes.
●
Coherent site model Quattor configurations are re-usable
and it can be used to manage a range of different
resources (real machines, VMs...)

5. The Configuration Management Data Base
Automated installation
management

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OpenNebula Quattor Component
●
The OpenNebula Quattor configuration module
was developed by HPC UGent team.
●
Available in production since Quattor 15.4.0 (June)
●
At this moment the OpenNebula installation and
configuration is 100% automated.

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Some ONE component features:
●
Oned service configuration
●
Sunstone service configuration
(also as standalone service)
●
Add/remove/update VNETs
●
Add/remove/update Hosts
●
Add/remove/update Datastores (Ceph and shared)
●
Add/remove/update internal users
●
VMM rc files configuration (KVM)
●
Each template includes a QUATTOR flag (boolean)

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ONE server template
example

9. OpenNebula
Component

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OpenNebula Quattor aii
●
The Automated Installation Infrastructure (aii) has
the ability to automatically install machines (from
a remote location).
●
Aii framework is responsible for translating the
configuration parameters from the node profiles
into installation instructions.
●
Current aii modules use node profiles to configure
DHCP servers, PXE boot, Kickstart installations,
but also OpenNebula VMs management...

11. Disks
Storage
VM
Template
Quattor VM
ONE RPC
endpoint
VNET
Leases

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What OpenNebula aii does?
●
It is able to translate any set of configuration parameters
of a physical machine into a virtual appliance.
●
It only requires a ONE RPC endpoint to work.
●
You must set a resources “mapping” to translate
physical specs: Memory, CPUs, storage, network..
into ONE templates.
●
It is able to start/stop/delete VMs and
generate/remove/update ONE templates on demand.

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ONE aii
template example

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VM template
generated by Quattor

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Future Work
●
Continue improving ONE Quattor support to include the
new OpenNebula features: Wild VMs import, VM
disks resizing...
●
Create a self-contained Ceph+OpenNebula cluster with
Quattor. Use ONE wild VMs import feature,
unfortunately wild VMs livemigration is still not
supported.
●
Configure an SSO with FreeIPA and Kerberos to
authenticate HPC UGent OpenNebula users.
●
All feedback and PRs are always welcome :-)

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Links
● Quattor web page
http://www.quattor.org/
● Quattor documentation overview
http://www.quattor.org/documentation/2012/06/19/documentation-
overview.html
● Quattor OpenNebula component in GitHub
https://github.com/quattor/configuration-modules-
core/tree/master/ncm-opennebula
● Quattor OpenNebula AII in GitHub
https://github.com/quattor/aii/tree/master/aii-opennebula
● Quattor template examples
https://github.com/quattor/template-library-examples

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Questions?