Introduction to Ganeti

A cluster virtualization manager.

What can it do?

• Manage clusters of physical machines
• Deploy Xen/KVM/lxc virtual machines on them
  • Live migration
  • Resiliency to failure (data redundancy over DRBD)
  • Cluster balancing
  • Ease of repairs and hardware swaps

Ideas

• Interact with the cluster as an entity, instead of the individual machines.
• Making the virtualization entry level as low as possible
  • Easy to install/manage
  • No specialized hardware needed (eg. SANs)
  • Lightweight (no "expensive" dependencies)
• Scale to enterprise ecosystems
  • Manage symultaneously from 1 to ~200 host machines
  • Access to advanced features (drbd, live migration)
• Be a good open source citizen
  • Design and code discussions are open
  • External contributions are welcome
  • Cooperate with other "big scale" Ganeti users

Terminology

• Instance: a virtualization guest
• Node: a virtualization host
• Nodegroup: an omogeneous set of nodes
• Cluster: a set of nodes, managed as a collective
• Job: a ganeti operation

Technologies

• Linux and standard utils (iproute2, bridge-utils, ssh)
• KVM/Xen/LXC
• DRBD, LVM, or SAN
• Python (plus a few modules)
• socat
• Haskell (optional)

Controlling Ganeti

• Command line (*)
• Ganeti Web manager
  • Developed by osuosl.org and grnet.gr
• RAPI (Rest-full http interface) (*)
• On-cluster "luxi" interface (*)
  • luxi is currently json over unix socket
  • there is code for python and haskell

(*) Programmable interfaces

People running Ganeti

• Google (Corporate Computing Infrastructure)
• grnet.gr (Greek Research & Technology Network)
• osuosl.org (Oregon State University Open Source Lab)
• fsffrance.org (according to docs on their website and trac)
• ...

Conclusion

Questions?