Turing Pi 1

Finally getting down to assembling and installing this 7 node cluster.

Mini-cluster (mclu) command line tool

After setting up my virtualization cluster I was disappointed by the available cluster management tools. You can either “go large” (Openstack) with all the associated trauma of setting that up, or go with various GUIs. Or you can run ssh & virsh commands, which gets tedious quickly.

Therefore I wrote some simple scripts to help perform common cluster operations on small clusters (up to about 10 nodes). It’s only 1000 lines of code, and the advantage is you only need sshd and libvirtd on each node, which you almost certainly have already.

You can download them from this git repository.

Get cluster status:

$ mclu status
ham0 (ham0.home.annexia.org) down
ham1 (ham1.home.annexia.org) down
ham2 (ham2.home.annexia.org) down
ham3 (ham3.home.annexia.org) down
$ mclu wake --all
$ mclu status
ham0 (ham0.home.annexia.org) up ssh: OK libvirt: OK
ham1 (ham1.home.annexia.org) up ssh: OK libvirt: OK
ham2 (ham2.home.annexia.org) up ssh: OK libvirt: OK
ham3 (ham3.home.annexia.org) up ssh: OK libvirt: OK

Build a new VM (using virt-builder):

$ mclu build --size=20G -- \
   ham0:tmp-f20-1 fedora-20 \
   --root-password password:123456

List running VMs, live-migrate the new one around:

Note that wildcards can be used when starting, stopping and migrating VMs:

$ mclu list
ham0:tmp-f20-1	running
$ mclu migrate \* ham2:
$ mclu list
ham2:tmp-f20-1	running
$ mclu stop ham2:*
$ mclu list
tmp-f20-1	inactive

Open a console

$ mclu start ham3:tmp-f20-1
$ mclu console tmp-f20-1
Connected to domain tmp-f20-1
Escape character is ^]
^]
$ mclu viewer tmp-f20-1
(graphical window opens)