Newbie questions

[David Li]

Hi,

I am totally new to this. I have got a few questions for the experts here:

1.  Before I try on the real hardware, I wonder if it's possible to use Virtualbox to test Stacki.  Especially I will need to test the install using UEFI PXE boot because we need to use UEFI secure boot after the install.

2. How does Stacki verify the signed Centos 7.1 kernel, initrd and kernel modules files during the install?

Thanks.

David

[Joe Kaiser]

Hi David,

Answers in-line. 

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:51 PM, David Li <dlip...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am totally new to this. I have got a few questions for the experts here:

Woohoo! Welcome into the pool!

 

1.  Before I try on the real hardware, I wonder if it's possible to use Virtualbox to test Stacki.  Especially I will need to test the install using UEFI PXE boot because we need to use UEFI secure boot after the install.

So a) yes it's possible to test Stacki on VirtualBox. Typically I develop and test on installing a frontend and a couple of backends on VirtualBox and then move to real hardware. 

 

b) I am working on UEFI. I don't have it running yet on either hardware or software. But it's my current development priority. 

UEFI is hard because there are so many moving pieces and the documentation can be sparse. 

2. How does Stacki verify the signed Centos 7.1 kernel, initrd and kernel modules files during the install?

Haven't gotten that far yet. We are mostly using what CentOS supplies in their EFI rpms. I can tell you more once I can actually get a machine to boot via UEFI PXE.

I will be posting to the list as I know more. 

Thanks,

Joe

[David Li]

Hi Joe,

Two more questions:

1. Do you know if current Vbox (5.0 or higher) is capable of UEFI
PXEboot? Do you have to development a Vbox extension to make this
happen? I wasn't able to find a definite answer on the Internet.

2. Where can I find instructions to try Stacki in Vbox using PXE
install (Legacy BIOS not UEFI)?

Thanks.

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[Joe Kaiser]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 2:18 PM, David Li <dlip...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Joe,

Two more questions:

1. Do you know if current Vbox (5.0 or higher) is capable of UEFI
PXEboot? Do you have to development a Vbox extension to make this
happen? I wasn't able to find a definite answer on the Internet.

It says it's capable as long as you check the Enable EFI under the System Menu.

I've tried it and it does attempt to boot into UEFI via PXE. I  wasn't successful but I also don't think I had have my frontend setup correctly.

 

2. Where can I find instructions to try Stacki in Vbox using PXE
install (Legacy BIOS not UEFI)?

Start here:

https://github.com/StackIQ/stacki/wiki

Specifically for the frontend:

https://github.com/StackIQ/stacki/wiki/Frontend-Installation

You can do it on an already running CentOS VM or install directly from the stacki-os ISO. Use 2.0 not 1.0.

Then do this for a backend:

https://github.com/StackIQ/stacki/wiki/Backend-Installation

On a 16G MacBook Pro, I can do one frontend and a couple of backends and still do other things on my laptop.  With 32G or more, I can do a VBox frontend and 4-5 backend nodes. 

I've also used a VBox frontend to install bare-metal machines. 

When developing/testing, I usually start with one frontend and one backend node. 

Thanks,

Joe

[David Li]

HI Joe,

Sounds good. I will give it a try in VirtualBox with legacy BIOS PXEboot

Another question:

Is Stacki only for Centos/RH install? Is it possible to install others
like FreeBSD with my own customization?

David

[Joe Kaiser]

You're more than welcome to try a customization, but as it stands now, it'spretty RH/CentOS based. In the early days though, it was possible to install Solaris. So it can be done. There is an ongoing internal discussion with regard to Ubuntu as well but it's only a discussion at this point. 

Thanks,

Joe

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[David Li]

I am curious if anyone here can compare Stacki to Cobbler. As I read about cobbler, it seems to be very similar to Stacki at high level. 

There is also another one called Foreman www.theforeman.org. Anyone knows the difference?

David

[Joe Kaiser]

Hi,

tl;dr: I'm biased. Stacki is the best thing for deploying data-center infrastructure.

I'm going to take a stab at answering this question without sounding like a marketing or sales guy. (I'm not, I'm just an engineer, but without the proper vaccine, marketing/sales guys can infect you. Sort of like hepatitis.) 

First, let's make things clear. 

I am biased.

I have worked for StackIQ for the past 8, yes count them, 8 years, in some capacity or another. (For the record, it was ClusterCorp when I started.)

But I'm even more biased than that:

I once ran a small medical transcription company back when the 2.0.32 Linux kernel came out. It was RHEL 4.1 before they started reusing the their numbers for names. It was the first 4.1. 

It was six machines. I slept 6 out of 72 hours getting 6 machines up. (The story is long and it involves my brother-in-law's Russian girlfriend and unreasonable demands and VA Hospitals and the need for 4 hour turn around on radiology reports.) 

If I had had something like Stacki, I would have slept that weekend and wouldn't have a story best told mumbling bitterly into a half-empty beer stein.

But I digress. I ran a large cluster at Fermilab, about 960 machines (split into 3 clusters on 3 different Class B public subnets)  and 1.5 PB of disk on the floor back when that took up 20 racks. I could reinstall it all in under an hour. This was installed and managed from one frontend. 

It was the Rocks project back then, but StackIQ took that code and has made it better. Way better. Like, really way better. 

But that doesn't answer your question. This might:

Okay, so I've used all three to some extent. My Cobbler experience is long ago so my comments may not be pertinent. I've used Foreman to deploy RHELs Havana OpenStack. We actually turned it into a product. So my familiarity with Foreman is more recent than Cobbler.

All of these solution require familiarity with kickstart. When I looked at Cobbler, I didn't like the way they managed the directory structure for kickstart and configuration. I thought it was overly complicated and not very intuitive, but that may have changed. Stacki tends to flatten that directory structure by using attributes and amped-html to map to kickstart. It makes keeping things in one place relatively simple. At the time I investigated Cobbler, they weren't using a database so every machine had to have it's own kickstart, that may also have changed. Stacki uses attributes so you essentially have a generated kickstart file that gets pulled and customized for each machine when it installs. This tends to make development and deployment faster. Write once andi

Foreman has a web-UI which can sometimes make things simpler. Foreman and RedHat are no longer in lockstep, so Foreman is really a Fedora thing. RedHat is moving away from Fedora as a way to deploy, however, their latest iteration looks a lot like Satellite Server.......

My general impression of Foreman was that it's designed to deploy everything in your company and not specifically for clusters which have to have the same configuration for their application stacks. You also tend to do clusters at larger numbers so something that takes minutes versus hours or days is good. We essentially give you a virtual machine deployment experience on bare metal (or on virtual machines.)

I think Cobbler and Foreman can do more than just RHEL/CentOS based distributions (Ubuntu?) but I may be wrong. Stacki does not, though we are exploring possibilities. 

We will beat Cobbler and Foreman on speed any day. Stacki does parallel formatting of disk and parallel sharing of installed RPMs in a peer-to-peer network which puts a much lighter load on the frontend.

The difference between installing 20 and a few hundred machines is measurable but not significantly so.

And it won't be easy to set-up disk controller configuration  in Foreman/Cobbler. With stacki you can set-up that configuration in a spreadsheet or on the command line and not touch the controller configuration in the BIOS. I'm pretty sure Cobbler and Foreman don't do that. 

If speed, multiple subnets, bonding, partitioning and absolutely consistent configuration are critical for you, then Stacki, I think, comes out on top. If you have a more disparate set of machines: desktops, small groups of servers, one off servers all of whose configuration is more customized, then Cobbler or Foreman might be the way to go. 

But I would to that with Stacki anyway because I'm biased. 

Thanks,

Joe