Overview
This is a set of Chef cookbooks to bring up an instance of an OpenStack-based cluster of head and worker nodes. In addition to hosting virtual machines, there are a number of additional services provided with these cookbooks - such as distributed storage, DNS, log aggregation/search, and monitoring - see below for a partial list of services provided by these cookbooks.
Each head node runs all of the core services in a highly-available manner with no restriction upon how many head nodes there are. The cluster is deemed operational as long as 50%+1 of the head nodes are online. Otherwise, a network partition may occur with a split-brain scenario. In practice, we currently recommend roughly one head node per rack.
Each worker node runs the relevant services (nova-compute, Ceph OSDs, etc.). There is no limitation on the number of worker nodes. In practice, we currently recommend that the cluster should not grow to more than 200 worker nodes.
Setup
To get going in a hurry, we recommend the Vagrant mechanism for building your cluster. Please read the Vagrant Bootstrap Guide for information on getting BCPC set up locally with Vagrant.
If you are interested in building your cluster the hard way without Vagrant, there are Ansible scripts in bootstrap/ansible_scripts for creating a hardware cluster that can be applied to a virtualized cluster (manual work will be required). The Ansible scripts are documented at Using Ansible (hardware build) and Using Ansible (local build).
BCPC Services
BCPC is built using the following open-source software:
- Apache HTTP Server
- Ceph
- Chef
- Cobbler
- Diamond
- ElasticSearch
- Etherboot
- Fluentd
- Graphite
- HAProxy
- Keepalived
- Kibana
- Memcached
- OpenStack
- Percona XtraDB Cluster
- PowerDNS
- RabbitMQ
- Ubuntu
- Vagrant - 1.7.4 or better recommended
- VirtualBox - 5.0.0 or better recommended
- Zabbix
Thanks to all of these communities for producing this software!