Ganeti quick installation guide

Please note that a more detailed installation procedure is described in the Ganeti installation tutorial. A glossary of terms can be found in the Glossary.

Software Requirements

Before installing, please verify that you have the following programs:

• Xen Hypervisor, version 3.0 or above, if running on Xen
• KVM Hypervisor, version 72 or above, if running on KVM. In order to use advanced features, such as live migration, virtio, etc, an even newer version is recommended (qemu-kvm versions 0.11.X or above have shown good behavior).
• DRBD, kernel module and userspace utils, version 8.0.7 or above
• LVM2
• OpenSSH
• bridge utilities
• iproute2
• arping (part of iputils)
• ndisc6 (if using IPv6)
• Python, version 2.4 or above, not 3.0
• Python OpenSSL bindings
• simplejson Python module
• pyparsing Python module
• pyinotify Python module
• PycURL Python module
• ctypes Python module, if running on python 2.4 (optional, used for node daemon memory locking)
• socat, see note below
• Paramiko, if you want automated SSH setup; optional otherwise but manual setup of the nodes required

These programs are supplied as part of most Linux distributions, so usually they can be installed via the standard package manager. Also many of them will already be installed on a standard machine. On Debian/Ubuntu, you can use this command line to install all required packages, except for DRBD and Xen:

$ apt-get install lvm2 ssh bridge-utils iproute iputils-arping \
                  ndisc6 python python-pyopenssl openssl \
                  python-pyparsing python-simplejson \
                  python-pyinotify python-pycurl socat

If you want to build from source, please see doc/devnotes.rst for more dependencies.

Note

Ganeti’s import/export functionality uses socat with OpenSSL for transferring data between nodes. By default, OpenSSL 0.9.8 and above employ transparent compression of all data using zlib if supported by both sides of a connection. In cases where a lot of data is transferred, this can lead to an increased CPU usage. Additionally, Ganeti already compresses all data using gzip where it makes sense (for inter-cluster instance moves).

To remedey this situation, patches implementing a new socat option for disabling OpenSSL compression have been contributed and will likely be included in the next feature release. Until then, users or distributions need to apply the patches on their own.

Ganeti will use the option if it’s detected by the configure script; auto-detection can be disabled by explicitely passing --enable-socat-compress (use the option to disable compression) or --disable-socat-compress (don’t use the option).

The patches and more information can be found on http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/contrib/socat-opensslcompress.html.

Installation of the software

To install, simply run the following command:

./configure --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc && \
make && \
make install

This will install the software under /usr/local. You then need to copy doc/examples/ganeti.initd to /etc/init.d/ganeti and integrate it into your boot sequence (chkconfig, update-rc.d, etc.).

Cluster initialisation

Before initialising the cluster, on each node you need to create the following directories:

• /etc/ganeti
• /var/lib/ganeti
• /var/log/ganeti
• /srv/ganeti
• /srv/ganeti/os
• /srv/ganeti/export

After this, use gnt-cluster init.