How to run a Sahara cluster on bare metal servers

Hadoop clusters are designed to store and analyze extremely large amounts of unstructured data in distributed computing environments. Sahara enables you to boot Hadoop clusters in both virtual and bare metal environments. When Booting Hadoop clusters with Sahara on bare metal servers, you benefit from the bare metal performance with self-service resource provisioning.

  1. Create a new OpenStack environment using Devstack as described in the Devstack Guide

  2. Install Ironic as described in the Ironic Installation Guide

  3. Install Sahara as described in the Sahara Installation Guide

  4. Build the Sahara image and prepare it for uploading to Glance:

    • Build an image for Sahara plugin which supports baremetal deployment. Refer to the Bare metal images section.

    • Convert the qcow2 image format to the raw format. For example:

$ qemu-img convert -O raw image-converted.qcow image-converted-from-qcow2.raw

  • Mount the raw image to the system.

  • chroot to the mounted directory and remove the installed grub.

  • Build grub2 from sources and install to /usr/sbin.

  • In /etc/sysconfig/selinux, disable selinux SELINUX=disabled

  • In the configuration file, set onboot=yes and BOOTPROTO=dhcp for every interface.

  • Add the configuration files for all interfaces in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory.

  1. Upload the Sahara disk image to Glance, and register it in the Sahara Image Registry. Referencing its separate kernel and initramfs images.

  2. Configure the bare metal network for the Sahara cluster nodes:

  • Add bare metal servers to your environment manually referencing their IPMI addresses (Ironic does not detect servers), for Ironic to manage the servers power and network. Also, configure the scheduling information and add the required flavors. Please check the Enrollment section of the Ironic installation guide.

  1. Launch your Sahara cluster on Ironic from the cluster template:

    • Log in to Horizon.

    • Go to Data Processing > Node Group Templates.

      • Find the templates that belong to the plugin you would like to use

      • Update those templates to use ‘bare metal’ flavor instead of the default one

    • Go to Data Processing > Cluster Templates.

    • Click Launch Cluster.

    • On the Launch Cluster dialog:

      • Specify the bare metal network for cluster nodes

The cluster provisioning time is slower compared to the cluster provisioning of the same size that runs on VMs. Ironic does real hardware reports which is time consuming, and the whole root disk is filled from /dev/zero for security reasons.

Known limitations:

  • Security groups are not applied.

  • Nodes are not isolated by projects.

  • VM to Bare Metal network routing is not allowed.

  • The user has to specify the count of ironic nodes before Devstack deploys an OpenStack.

  • The user cannot use the same image for several ironic node types. For example, if there are 3 ironic node types, the user has to create 3 images and 3 flavors.

  • Multiple interfaces on a single node are not supported. Devstack configures only one interface.