Ganeti Cluster tools (ganeti-htools)
====================================

These are some simple cluster tools for fixing common allocation
problems on Ganeti 2.0 clusters.

Note that these tools are most useful for bigger cluster sizes
(e.g. more than five or ten machines); at lower sizes, the
computations they do can also be done manually.

Most of the tools revolve around the concept of keeping the cluster
N+1 compliant: this means that in case of failure of any node, the
instances affected can be failed over (via ``gnt-node failover`` or
``gnt-instance failover``) to their secondary node, and there is
enough memory reserved for this operation without needing to shutdown
other instances or rebalance the cluster.

**Quick start** (see the installation section for more details):

- (have the ghc compiler and the prerequisite libraries installed)
- make
- ./hbal -m $cluster -C -p
- look at the original and final cluster layout, and if acceptable,
  execute the given commands


Available tools
---------------

Cluster rebalancer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The rebalancer uses a simple algorithm to try to get the nodes of the
cluster as equal as possible in their resource usage. It tries to
repeatedly move each instance one step, so that the cluster score
becomes better. We stop when no further move can improve the score.

For algorithm details and usage, see the man page hbal(1).

Cluster N+1 solver
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This program runs a very simple brute force algorithm over the instance
placement space in order to determine the shortest number of replace-disks
needed to fix the cluster. Note this means we won't get a balanced cluster,
just one that passes N+1 checks.

For algorithm details and usage, see the man page hn1(1).

.. note:: This program is deprecated, hbal should be used instead.

IAllocator plugin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ``hail`` iallocator plugin can be used for allocations of mirrored
and non-mirrored instances and for relocations of mirrored
instances. It needs to be installed in Ganeti's iallocator search
path—usually ``/usr/lib/ganeti/iallocators`` or
``/usr/local/lib/ganeti/iallocators``, and after that it can be used
via ganeti's ``--iallocator`` option (in various gnt-node/gnt-instance
commands). See the man page hail(1) for more details.

Cluster capacity estimator
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ``hspace`` program will, given an input instance specification,
estimate how many instances of those type can be place on the cluster
before it will become full (as in any new allocation would fail N+1
checks). For more details, see the man page hspace(1).


Integration with Ganeti
-----------------------

The ``hbal``, ``hspace`` and ``hn1`` programs can either get their
input from text files, or online from a cluster via RAPI. For online
collection via RAPI, the "-m" argument to both hn1 and hbal should
specify the cluster or master node name. ``hail`` uses the standard
iallocator API and thus doesn't need any special setup (just needs to
be installed in the right directory).

For generating the text files, a separate tool (``hscan``) is provided
to automate their gathering if RAPI is available, which is better
since it can extract more precise information. In case RAPI is not
usable for whatever reason, the following two commands should be run::

    gnt-node list -oname,mtotal,mnode,mfree,dtotal,dfree,offline \
      --separator '|' --no-headers > nodes
    gnt-instance list -oname,be/memory,sda_size,be/vcpus,status,pnode,snodes \
      --separator '|' --no-head > instances

These two files should be saved under the names of *nodes* and
*instances*.

The ``hail`` program gets its data automatically from Ganeti when used
as described in its section.

Installation
------------

If installing from source, you need a working ghc compiler (6.8 at
least) and some extra Haskell libraries which usually need to be
installed manually:

- json (http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/json)
- curl (http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/curl)

Once these are installed, just typing *make* in the top-level
directory should be enough.

Only the ``hail`` program needs to be installed in a specific place,
the other tools are not location-dependent.

For running the (admittedly small) unittest suite (via *make check*),
the QuickCheck version 1 library is needed.

Internal (implementation) documentation is available in the ``apidoc``
directory.

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