vSphere Cluster creation requirements - cluster-computing

I've been searching around but haven't found a clear answer on this.
We're using VMware ESXI with vSphere to manage a handful of VMs (about 15 right now)
However, these are all spread over three separate machines. I'm looking for a way to cluster these together so their resources can be pooled or dynamically allocated. I found vSphere DRS Cluster information, but I'm having a really hard time finding out what I need to get that set up.
Does it require a separate vCenter license to hook into vSphere? And at that point, how do I create a database to group all the server hosts together? Every tutorial I find already has 2+ host machines already grouped together in the vSphere client, and I'm not sure how to go about achieving that.

If you just want to create a failover cluster, then you need VMware HA. VMware DRS is the option for resource dynamical allocation. To manage these two options, you need a vCenter Server. vCenter Server Foundation can manage up to 3 hosts (which is your case). For more information about vCenter, see this link.
For VMware HA and DRS to work, you must have a shared storage (NFS, iSCSI, or Fiber Channel). To know how to create VMware HA cluster using vSphere Client (connected to vCenter Server), see this link.
VMware DRS is an option after you created VMware HA. See this link

Related

configure MSMQ cluster failover on an azure vm (windows server 2016)

I want to create a Failover cluster for MSMQ for two vm's in azure. I created two VM's in azure and have them domain joined. I can create the failover cluster with both nodes. However when i try to add a role for MSMQ i need an cluster shared disk. I tried to create a new managed disk in azure and attach it to the vm's but it still wasn't able to find the disk.
Also tried fileshare-sync, but still not working.
I found out i need iSCSI disk, there was this article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storsimple/storsimple-virtual-array-deploy3-iscsi-setup . But it is end of life next year.
So i am wondering if it is possible to setup a failover cluster for msmq on azure and if so how can i do it?
Kind regards,
You should be able to create a Cluster Shared Volume using Storage Spaces Direct across a cluster of Azure VMs. Here are instructions for a SQL failover cluster. I assume this should work for MSMQ, but I haven't set up MSMQ in over 10 years and I don't' know if requirements are different.

Ansible: How to remove & register a VM from VCenter?

I need to do a vmotion and I would need:
Unregister machine from VMWare VCenter.
Register that machine into another cluster.
Is it possible to do with an Ansible module?
Thanks in advance!
Among the same cluster, have you tried :
vmware_vmotion – Move a virtual machine using vMotion, and/or its vmdks using storage vMotion ?
but you're talking about 'another cluster' so i think it won't work :
as said in Live Migration of Virtual Machines
VMware vSphere vMotion is a zero downtime live migration of workloads
from one server to another. This capability is possible across
vSwitches, Clusters, and even Clouds
So you are not doing vMotion by migrating from a cluster to another (you will have down time).
What you want to do is stop vm, download vmdk files from a cluster, upload it to another, and restore a vm with it (but i never did that, i only have one cluster)
As far as I can tell, when using vmware_guest, setting a VM state to "absent" will destroy it instead of unregistering it.
Similarly, I don't see any way to add a VM back to the inventory by way of a VMX file.

How to deploy a Cassandra cluster on two ec2 machines?

It's a known fact that it is not possible to create a cluster in a single machine by changing ports. The workaround is to add virtual Ethernet devices to our machine and use these to configure the cluster.
I want to deploy a cluster of , let's say 6 nodes, on two ec2 instances. That means, 3 nodes on each machine. Is it possible? What should be the seed nodes address, if it's possible?
Is it a good idea for production?
You can use Datastax AMI on AWS. Datastax Enterprise is a suitable solution for production.
I am not sure about your cluster, because each node need its own config files and it is default. I have no idea how to change it.
There are simple instructions here. When you configure instances settings, you have to write advanced settings for cluster, like --clustername yourCluster --totalnodes 6 --version community etc. You also can install Cassandra manually by installing latest version java and cassandra.
You can build cluster by modifying /etc/cassandra/cassandra.yaml (Ubuntu 12.04) fields like cluster_name, seeds, listener_address, rpc_broadcast and token. Cluster_name have to be same for whole cluster. Seed is master node, which IP you should add for every node. I am confused about tokens

How make a cluster of CoreOS on my local infrastructure?

I have some professional servers, and I want to create a cluster of 7-15 machines with CoreOS. I'm a little familiar with Proxmox, but I'm not clear about how create a virtual machine(VM) with CoreOS on proxmox. Also, I'm not sure if the idea of cluster of CoreOS's VM on proxmox it's right to do.
Then, I need:
How create a VM with CoreOS on proxmox.
If will be viable proxmox to create CoreOS's cluster.
I have no experience with Proxmox, but if you can make an image that runs then you can use it to stamp out the cluster. What you'd need to do is boot the ISO, run the installer and then make an image of that. Be sure to delete /etc/machine-id before you create the image.
CoreOS uses cloud-config to connect the machines together and configure a few parameters related to networking -- basically anything to get the machines talking to the cluster. A cloud-config file should be provided as a config-drive image, which is basically like mounting a CD-ROM to the VM. You'll have to check the docs on Proxmox to see if it supports that. More info here: http://coreos.com/docs/cluster-management/setup/cloudinit-config-drive/
The other option you have is to skip the VMs altogether and instead of using Proxmox, just boot CoreOS directly on your hardware. You can do this by booting the ISO and installing or doing something like iPXE: http://coreos.com/docs/running-coreos/bare-metal/booting-with-ipxe/

Monitoring instances in cloud

I usually use Munin as monitoring software, but this (as others software I presume) needs an IP to make the ICMP or whatever pings to collect data.
In Amazon EC2 instances are created on the fly, with IP's you don't know.
How can they be monitored ?
I was thinking about using amazon console commands to read the IP's of the instances up, and change the monit configuration file on the fly also , but it can be too complicated ... or not?
Any other solution / suggestion ?
Thank you
I use revealcloud to monitor my amazon instances. You can install it once and create an ami from that systen, or bootstrap the install command if that's your method. Since the install is just one command, it's easy enough to put into the rc.local (or similar). You can then see all the instances in the dashboard or topiew as soon as they boot up.
Our instances are bootstrapped using chef recipes, so it's easier for me to provide IPs/hosts as they (= all members of my cluster) get entered into /etc/hosts on start-up. Generally, it doesn't hurt to use elastic IPs for a master server and allow all connections (in /etc/munin/munin.conf by default).
I'd solve the security 'question' on the security groups level. E.g. allow only instances with a certain security group to connect to the munin-node process (on port 4949). The question which remains is.
E.g., using ec2-authorize you can achieve
ec2-authorize mygroup -o monitorgroup -u <AWS-USER-ID>
This means that all instances with group monitorgroup can access resources on instances with mygroup.
Let me know if this helps!
If your Munin master and nodes are all hosted on EC2 than it's better to use internal hosts like domU-00-00-00-00-00-00.compute-1.internal. because this way you don't have to deal with IP addresses and security groups.
You also have to set this in /etc/munin/munin-node.conf:
allow ^.*$
You can read more about it in Monitoring AWS Ubuntu Instances using Munin
But if your Munin master is not on EC2 your best bet is to attach Elastic IP to your EC2 instance.

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