AN!Wiki :: AN!CDB - Cluster Dashboard

AN!CDB, the Alteeve's Niche! Cluster Dashboard, is a management tool for clusters built following the 2-Node Red Hat KVM Cluster Tutorial.

It's first and foremost goal is to be extremely easy to use. No special skills or understanding of HA is required!

To achieve this ease of use, the cluster must be built to fairly specific requirements. Simplicity of use requires many assumptions be made.

AN!CDB provides;

A single view of all cluster components and their current status.
- Control of the cluster nodes. Nodes can be:
  - Powered On, Powered Off and Fenced
  - Join to and withdrawn from the cluster
- Control of the virtual servers. Servers can be:
  - Booted up, gracefully shut down and forced off
  - Migrated between nodes
- Create, modify and delete servers;
  - Create and upload installation and driver media
  - Provision new servers, installing from media just like bare-iron servers
  - Insert and Eject CD/DVD images
  - Change allocated RAM and CPUs
  - Delete servers that are no longer needed.

AN!CDB is designed to run on a machine outside of the cluster. The only customization needed is for the cluster name and the name of the nodes be added to the program. Once done, AN!CDB will collect and cache everything needed to control the cluster, even when both nodes are offline.

Installation

Installing AN!CDB is very easy now. The instructions are at the page below;

Installing AN!CDB

AN! generally installed the 'AN!CDB on ASUS EeeBox PC-EB1033 1-liter nettop PCs. You should be able to use any computer or appliance that can run the 64-bit version RHEL or CentOS version 6.

Using AN!CDB

Feel free to jump to the section you are interested in. The order below was compiled as a "story line" of how someone might use AN!CDB to "cold boot" a new Anvil!, create some servers, take a node out for maintenance, manage existing servers, boot a windows server off of the install disk for recovery, "cold stop" and Anvil! and delete servers.

All screen shots shown here were taken in late July 2013. AN!CDB is always evolving so what you see today may differ somewhat from what you see here.

Connecting to the Dashboard

Open a web browser and browse to the dashboard. Here we will use the actual dashboard's desktop, so we will browse to http://localhost. If you connect from another computer, browse to the IP address or host name you setup for the dashboard.

When you first connect, you will be asked to log into the dashboard. The default user name is admin. There is no default password, but it usually set to the same password used when logging into the dashboard's desktop as the alteeve user.

If you do not know what the password is, please contact support. We can not recover your password, but we can help you reset it.

Installing Server Operating Systems

KVM/QEMU maintained list of tested guest OS.

Windows 7

Windows 7 Professional has a limit of two sockets. The hypervisor presents each core as a socket, so Windows 7 will only use up to two cores.

Solaris 11

There is a harmless but verbose bug when using Solaris 11. You will see errors like:

WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci1af4,1100@1,2 (uhci0): No SOF interrupts have been received
, this USB UHCI host controller is unusable

Ignore this until the install is complete. Once the OS is installed, run:

rem_drv uhci

The errors will no longer appear.

Solution found here.

Any questions, feedback, advice, complaints or meanderings are welcome.
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© Alteeve's Niche! Inc. 1997-2024		Anvil! "Intelligent Availability®" Platform
`legal stuff: All info is provided "As-Is". Do not use anything here unless you are willing and able to take responsibility for your own actions.`

AN!CDB - Cluster Dashboard

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