Provisioning 50 cluster nodes

[Jagga Soorma]

Hi Guys,

I have been using cobbler for a few months now and it has worked very
well for us.  However, we have been only building a few servers at a
time and my current process of having our SA's run a "cobbler system
add" command for each server has worked just fine.  I now have a
requirement to build a cluster with 50+ nodes and was wondering how to
automate this as much as possible.  Has anyone out there already done
something similar?  If so, how did you approach this?  I would hate to
tell someone to run the cobbler system add command for 50 servers.

Thanks in advance for your help with this!

Regards.

[Alan Evangelista]

On 04/29/2015 12:51 AM, Jagga Soorma wrote:
>  I now have a
>  requirement to build a cluster with 50+ nodes and was wondering how to
>  automate this as much as possible.  Has anyone out there already done
>  something similar?  If so, how did you approach this?  I would hate to
>  tell someone to run the cobbler system add command for 50 servers. 
I suppose you have a list of the MAC addresses and power management data 
(and maybe
IP addresses) of the 50+ nodes. Simply create a Python script which 
creates the missing
system data (eg name) automatically and uses Cobbler CLI / XML-RPC 
interface to add the
systems to Cobbler.


Regards,
Alan Evangelista

[Jagga Soorma]

Actually I don't have the mac addresses handy.  Would have to login to
the ilo/idrac of each server and grab the mac which is very time
consuming.  I do have all the hostnames and ip addresses defined in
dns.  Is there a way for me to get the bare metal hardware to tell the
cobbler server its mac addresses and auto register somehow.  From
there maybe I can write a shell script to populate the other needed
info.

Thanks.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Alan Evangelista
<alanoe(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com&gt; wrote:
>  On 04/29/2015 12:51 AM, Jagga Soorma wrote:
> >
> > I now have a
> > requirement to build a cluster with 50+ nodes and was wondering how to
> > automate this as much as possible.  Has anyone out there already done
> > something similar?  If so, how did you approach this?  I would hate to
> > tell someone to run the cobbler system add command for 50 servers.
>
>
>  I suppose you have a list of the MAC addresses and power management data
>  (and maybe
>  IP addresses) of the 50+ nodes. Simply create a Python script which creates
>  the missing
>  system data (eg name) automatically and uses Cobbler CLI / XML-RPC interface
>  to add the
>  systems to Cobbler.
>
>
>  Regards,
>  Alan Evangelista
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler

[Alan Evangelista]

On 04/29/2015 01:11 AM, Jagga Soorma wrote:
>  Actually I don't have the mac addresses handy.  Would have to
> login to
>  the ilo/idrac of each server and grab the mac which is very time
>  consuming. 
Write a script to do that? expect/pexpect may be helpful.

>  I do have all the hostnames and ip addresses defined in
>  dns.  Is there a way for me to get the bare metal hardware to tell the
>  cobbler server its mac addresses and auto register somehow. 
If your bare metal hardware is in the same LAN of the Cobbler server, 
you can use "arp -a"
after pinging the bare metal hardware from Cobbler server to get its MAC 
address.
If Cobbler server is not in the same LAN, you could split this in 2 
steps: run a MAC address
discovery script in a system which *is* in the same LAN of the bare 
metal hardware and then
add the systems to Cobbler.


Regards,
Alan Evangelista

[André Gemünd]

Hi,

>  Is there a way for me to get the bare metal hardware to tell the
>  cobbler server its mac addresses and auto register somehow.  From
>  there maybe I can write a shell script to populate the other needed
>  info. 
yes, we usually use a default that runs a kickstart containing the 
$SNIPPET('cobbler_register'). This will create the system records for 
you. The rest then is just scripting. Of course one has to be a bit 
careful with defaults like that, so we change it afterwards. 
Also don't forget to re-enable netboot for the real install because of 
pxe_just_once.

Greetings
Andre
-- 
André Gemünd
Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing
andre.gemuend(a)scai.fraunhofer.de
Tel: [phone]
/C=DE/O=Fraunhofer/OU=SCAI/OU=People/CN=Andre Gemuend

[Alan Evangelista]

On 04/29/2015 12:29 PM, André Gemünd wrote:
> > Is there a way for me to get the bare metal hardware to tell the
> > cobbler server its mac addresses and auto register somehow.  From
> > there maybe I can write a shell script to populate the other needed
> > info.
>  yes, we usually use a default that runs a kickstart containing the
>  $SNIPPET('cobbler_register'). This will create the system records for
>  you. 
I do not understand how an auto-register snippet is useful if you'd need 
to add the system
to Cobbler before being able to provision it. Could you explain better? 
I'm not familiar with this
part of the code.

Anyway, copying koan's register.py to all systems and running it to auto 
register each system in
Cobbler is a good option. My original suggestion of using arp from 
Cobbler server to systems
was more limited.


Regards,
Alan Evangelista

[André Gemünd]

Sorry, 
maybe I was a bit unclear. You do not necessarily need the system entries to kickstart
machines, you can also work with menus or, as I meant, with a default entry in
pxelinux.cfg. When we use a dedicated cobbler for a cluster, we usually have a menu there
with password-protected entries for all our installation profiles, and simply temporarily
exchange it with a hardcoded entry for the registration purpose. There are plenty of ways
to do it otherwise, e.g. with a %pre script in an otherwise harmless kickstart or a custom
boot image which contains cobbler-register, etc.

Greetings
Andre

----- Am 29. Apr 2015 um 17:51 schrieb Alan Evangelista alanoe(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com:

>  On 04/29/2015 12:29 PM, André Gemünd wrote:
> >> Is there a way for me to get the bare metal hardware to tell the
> >> cobbler server its mac addresses and auto register somehow.  From
> >> there maybe I can write a shell script to populate the other needed
> >> info.
> > yes, we usually use a default that runs a kickstart containing the
> > $SNIPPET('cobbler_register'). This will create the system records for
> > you.
>  
>  I do not understand how an auto-register snippet is useful if you'd need
>  to add the system
>  to Cobbler before being able to provision it. Could you explain better?
>  I'm not familiar with this
>  part of the code.
>  
>  Anyway, copying koan's register.py to all systems and running it to auto
>  register each system in
>  Cobbler is a good option. My original suggestion of using arp from
>  Cobbler server to systems
>  was more limited.
>  
>  
>  Regards,
>  Alan Evangelista
>  
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler 
-- 
André Gemünd
Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing
andre.gemuend(a)scai.fraunhofer.de
Tel: [phone]
/C=DE/O=Fraunhofer/OU=SCAI/OU=People/CN=Andre Gemuend

[Michael Tiernan]

On 4/29/15 11:51 AM, Alan Evangelista wrote:
>  Anyway, copying koan's register.py to all systems and running it
> to auto
>  register each system in
>  Cobbler is a good option. 
Just out of curiosity is register.py (or cobbler-register) available
outside of koan?

[Alan Evangelista]

On 05/06/2015 04:48 PM, Michael Tiernan wrote:
>  Just out of curiosity is register.py (or cobbler-register) available
>
>  outside of koan? 
afaik no.


Regards,
Alan Evangelista

[thomas]

Hi all,
    We have a project called CIB(Cloud In a Box), in which we have 
provisioning cluster nodes using cobbler. We have built CIB on cobbler 
to provisioning new nodes. We can add any number of nodes here.
    For more Read here http://docs.megam.io/v1.0/docs/megam_whatis_beebox

On Thursday 07 May 2015 11:20 AM, Alan Evangelista wrote:
>  On 05/06/2015 04:48 PM, Michael Tiernan wrote:
> > Just out of curiosity is register.py (or cobbler-register) available 
> > outside of koan?
>
>  afaik no.
>
>
>  Regards,
>  Alan Evangelista
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler 
-- 
Thomas Alrin,
Infrastructure Engineer, Megam Systems
mail : thomasalrin(a)megam.io <mailto:[e-mail]>, cell: +91 
9789345999
Web : https://megam.io <https://www.megam.io> | Twitter : @thomasalrin 
<https://twitter.com/thomasalrin>
Git : thomasalrin <https://github.com/thomasalrin> | Facebook : 
thomasalrin <https://www.facebook.com/thomasalrin>

[Alan Crosswell]

You might want to take a look at Puppet Lab's Razor which is designed for
scale. I've been playing around with it a bit to compare it to Cobbler.
/a


On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:57 PM, Alan Evangelista <
alanoe(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com&gt; wrote:

>  On 04/29/2015 12:51 AM, Jagga Soorma wrote:
>
> > I now have a
> > requirement to build a cluster with 50+ nodes and was wondering how to
> > automate this as much as possible.  Has anyone out there already done
> > something similar?  If so, how did you approach this?  I would hate to
> > tell someone to run the cobbler system add command for 50 servers.
> >
>
>  I suppose you have a list of the MAC addresses and power management data
>  (and maybe
>  IP addresses) of the 50+ nodes. Simply create a Python script which
>  creates the missing
>  system data (eg name) automatically and uses Cobbler CLI / XML-RPC
>  interface to add the
>  systems to Cobbler.
>
>
>  Regards,
>  Alan Evangelista
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
>  


--

[André Gemünd]

I don't think you need any specially scaling tools for ~ 50 nodes. We've been
doing around 40-50 nodes with cobbler in 2009 already. 

Greetings
Andre

----- Am 29. Apr 2015 um 17:38 schrieb Alan Crosswell alan(a)columbia.edu:

>  You might want to take a look at Puppet Lab's Razor which is
> designed for scale.
>  I've been playing around with it a bit to compare it to Cobbler.
>  /a
>  
>  
>  On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:57 PM, Alan Evangelista < alanoe(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com >
>  wrote:
>  
>  
>  On 04/29/2015 12:51 AM, Jagga Soorma wrote:
>  
>  
>  I now have a
>  requirement to build a cluster with 50+ nodes and was wondering how to
>  automate this as much as possible. Has anyone out there already done
>  something similar? If so, how did you approach this? I would hate to
>  tell someone to run the cobbler system add command for 50 servers.
>  
>  I suppose you have a list of the MAC addresses and power management data (and
>  maybe
>  IP addresses) of the 50+ nodes. Simply create a Python script which creates the
>  missing
>  system data (eg name) automatically and uses Cobbler CLI / XML-RPC interface to
>  add the
>  systems to Cobbler.
>  
>  
>  Regards,
>  Alan Evangelista
>  
>  
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
>  
>  
>  
>  --
>  
>  
>  _______________________________________________
>  cobbler mailing list
>  cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler 
-- 
André Gemünd
Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing
andre.gemuend(a)scai.fraunhofer.de
Tel: [phone]
/C=DE/O=Fraunhofer/OU=SCAI/OU=People/CN=Andre Gemuend