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2. Installation

The goal of this part is to ease the deployment system installation steps and give information about all the relevant required tools and their configuration.

2.1 Perl

2.2 Database

This part presents the database used.

Why use a database ?

kadeploy uses a database to maintain the persistance of the information about the cluster composition and current state.

The cluster composition is described via :

The cluster state is described via :

How does the database evolve during a deployment execution ?

During a deployment execution, its state and the one of the partition involved changes in the database.

A deployment can be in one of the following states :

By convention, there cannot be more than one deployment waiting for nodes.

A partition can be in one of the following states :

By convention, a node involved in a running deployment cannot take part in another deployment.

The two conventions above guarantee that a node cannot be involved in two different deployments at the same time even on different disks and/or partitions.

When a deployment ends :

How to install the database ?

It is possible to create both databases manually. All you have to do is to run the command lines below. This will create the deploy and deploy_right databases and the appropriate users with read and/or write rights.

# mysql -u root -p < tools/db/deploy_db_creation.sql

Enter password: ********

# mysql -u root -p < tools/db/rights_db_creation.sql

Enter password: ********

Next step will be to fill in the database. That can be done easily using the kaaddnode command.

How to configure access to databse ?

In order for the deployment system to access to the database, correct information e.g. database name, login and password should be filled in the configuration file for each database. See the database part in the configuration file section for further details.

2.3 PXE/TFTP

This part explains how to configure PXE/TFTP to control the booting process on the cluster nodes.

Hardware specifications

The nodes' hardware must be PXE compliant, this means that the BIOS/EFI should allow to boot from the ethernet card. To ensure that, you must verify that the network interface is PXE compliant.

Required software

To be able to handle PXE requests from the booting nodes, the server should have a set of running servers, which must fit minimum requirements:

TFTP structure

Here is an example of a TFTP structure:

/tftpboot/
   PXEClient/
      images_grub/
      pxelinux.cfg/
      pxelinux.0
      messages
      help.txt
   X86PC/
      linux/
         images_grub/
         pxelinux.cfg/
         linux.0
         nbplinux.0
         messages
         help.txt

This directory structure and allow to respond to different PXE request schemes. The slight differences are not our business here, you should refer to the different PXE standards for this part. Let's have a short look at this structure :

These two last directories contain both about the same structure :

These four directories (two in each tftp directory) should be writtable by the deploy user, to allow kadeploy to control the way the nodes are booting.

2.4 System Requirements

Required privileges to execute kadeploy

kadeploy requires to perform some changes on the server, to control the way the nodes are booting. Some other tools like kaconsole or kareboot needs to connect to other computers. The purpose of this part is to define all the required privileges to ensure a smooth execution of kadeploy, and secure it by avoiding unnecessary privileges.


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