RE: package management on clusters
- From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jeremy.schneider@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:01:59 -0500
Well, there's a couple ways to do this. First off, OS packages can get pretty
ugly for this sort of thing, for the reasons you've identified, but also
because most OS packages only allow you to install one instance of a package.
So, the instant you want to do separate homes, let's say, you can't just do a
pkgadd -d Oracleinstall.pkg again to make a separate home. Also, most OS
packaging systems are lousy about changing layout or configuration - so you
might be able to change the root directory, but if you want to do something
like "oracle gets installed in /u01/app/oracle/{version}/{sid}", you can't
without all sorts of horrible post-script mojo.
But back to ways to deal with this problem -
One is (let's get this out of the way quickly) you can use a cluster-aware
database deployment and automation software package like the one my company
makes, which removes the whole OS packaging out of the picture, and handles
these types of environments.
Another is that you actually move the content out of the OS package, and
basically use the scripts in the package to do everything. In this scenario,
the package has a placeholder file, something like /etc/pkgname.isinstalled (or
whatever you want to call it), and nothing else for the content, but there are
post-scripts that run. That post-script looks for the presence of the files on
the CFS, and if not found, it contacts an external fileserver and downloads the
tarball and extracts it. When the same package is installed on the other node,
the script sees the files are already there and simply downloads the local
bits. Uninstall works in reverse - you could even do something crafty like
having the remove post-script detect whether it's the last node being removed
from (i.e. you put your placeholder files on the CFS, so when there's just one
left, you know that's the last node), and if it is, it removes the CFS
components.
The last is to use a configuration management system that is built like a state
machine, instead of around packages. You would define a configuration based on
the files, and when it's done on the first node, it will install everything,
when it runs on the second node, it will see most of the files are already
there. I believe you can do this with Bladelogic (now owned by BMC), and
Puppet is an open-source config management system that can do this.
Hope this helps,
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Jeremy Schneider
Sent: Thu 2/12/2009 8:22 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: package management on clusters
This question is peripherally related to Oracle... but maybe someone has
a good idea.
Does anyone have a suggestion for managing packages on a cluster? We
typically repackage database binaries as RPMs for wide-scale deployment.
Most of the clusters we have currently utilize a CFS. Support scripts
are installed onto the CFS with a tarball and we arbitrarily pick a node
to install the database server package onto the CFS. The other nodes
don't know that the database package is installed and the OS package
inventories across the cluster are out of sync. We manually sync up the
Oracle inventories as part of the installation (happily, they are
cluster-aware).
Any ideas how we could manage files which are installed into a cluster
filesystem and available across the cluster? Should they even be
registered in the OS's package DB or perhaps we should just use a
tarball? (But we don't want another database server package to make with
every build. and there are some great benefits to the package management
on non-cluster systems...) Not really interested in actually running the
installer in silent mode since it's much faster this way and we have
tight control over server configurations the package is getting
installed into.
I really can't think of a good solution that keeps the benifits of
package management without the downsides of non-cluster-aware-ness on
both Solaris and Linux.
-Jeremy
--
Jeremy Schneider
Chicago, IL
http://www.ardentperf.com
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
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