Cluster architecture description#

The ALICE build infrastructure consists of two kinds of nodes: masters, responsible for scheduling jobs, and agents, responsible for executing jobs and services. They are in general provisioned using CERN Openstack Infrastructure and configured using the CERN Puppet / Foreman setup.

Masters belong to the Puppet hostgroup alibuild/mesos/master while agents belong to alibuild/mesos/slave. The configuration of those hostgroups can be found in the master branch of the it-puppet-hostgroup-alibuild git repository, in particular in:

/code/manifests/mesos/master.pp for the master.
/code/manifests/mesos/slave.pp for the slaves.

In order to be able to modify this configuration, and to create or deploy machines in those hostgroups, you will have to be part of the alice-puppet and alice-agile-admin hostgroups.

We have in particular three masters, each running on a separate OpenStack availability zone. These work in a High Availability (HA) mode, which allows the ensemble to continue working correctly, even in the eventuality that one of the machines goes down. A diagram for the services running on the masters can be found below:

The masters run the following services:

The Nomad server: Nomad is used to schedule and deploy jobs like CI builders and publishers automatically on the cluster.
The Consul server: A key-value store, used for its DNS features (Nomad jobs are assigned <job name>.service.consul domain names), and used as a backing store for Vault.
The Vault server: This service stores secrets and lets Nomad jobs use them, by substituting them into job declarations on-the-fly.
Prometheus: A monitoring service that polls various running jobs, in addition to the Nomad, Consul and Vault servers, and sends metrics to MONIT Cortex. This integration is documented here.

Essential Operation Guides#

Getting access to the OpenStack / Puppet infrastructure
Creating a master
Backup the masters
Rebuild a master
Creating an agent
Reboot an agent
Delete an agent

Getting access to the OpenStack / Puppet infrastructure#

First of all make sure you have all the rights to create machines in OpenStack and to administer them via Puppet.

To get the OpenStack access rights, you should ask to become member of the alice-vm-admin egroup. To get the Puppet rights, you should ask to become member of the alice-agile-admin egroup. This can be done using the usual egroups interface.

Once you have those rights to use OpenStack, you need to ssh into the CERN OpenStack administration machines (aiadm.cern.ch) and obtain the correct OpenStack credentials for the virtual machines by running:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

or, for the physical machines managed by CERN IT:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing - physical nodes")

You can now execute the various OpenStack commands, using the CLI tool called openstack. While an exhaustive list of all the available options can be optained via openstack help -h, for the process of spawning new machines you probably only care about:

openstack server list: list the machines in the project you specified on the eval $(ai-rc ...) line above
openstack image list: list of OS images you can use. The build nodes should use the latest "Alma 9" ones.
openstack flavor list: list available flavors of virtual machines (i.e. how many CPUs, RAM).

Further information on how CERN OpenStack cloud works can be found here.

Note that you will have to login as root to all the machines.

Checklist to verify the status of a master#

In case there are issues with one of the masters you should follow the following checklist:

Check on the Openstack Dashboard if the machine is up and running.
Check in Foreman if there are any puppet errors.
Ping the machine.
SSH into the machine.
Check if docker.service, nomad.service, consul.service and vault.service are running.

Creating a master#

Creation of masters in CERN Foreman setup is described in the Configuration Management User Guide. The short recipe for a build machine is:

Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

- To spawn a machine you need to use the ai-bs wrapper, which will take care of provisioning the machine and putting it in Foreman, so that it will receive from it the Puppet configuration:

MACHINE_NAME=<alimesosXX>
ZONE=cern-geneva-<X> # <X> needs to be in {a,b,c}
                     # make sure you use different zones
                     # to improve availability.

ai-bs -g alibuild/mesos/master               \
      --foreman-environment alibuild_devel   \
      --alma9                                \
      --nova-sshkey alibuild                 \
      --nova-availabilityzone $ZONE          \
      --nova-flavor m2.large                 \
      --landb-mainuser alice-agile-admin     \
      --landb-responsible alice-agile-admin  \
      $MACHINE_NAME

Backup master#

Backing up of the masters is done for the /build/consul folder via the standard backup service of CERN/IT. The service itself is setup via puppet as usual. Things which can resuscitate a backup when it fails:

# restarting the service
service dsmcad restart
# Asking for an incremental backup
dsmc incremental

Creating an agent#

Creation of mesos agents in CERN Foreman setup is described in the Configuration Management User Guide. The short recipe for a build machine is:

Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing (for build machines):

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

or, for the physical/bare-metal machines:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing - physical nodes")

In order to create new machines, you will also need the public SSH key to be added on the alibuild machines. Execute (assuming you have saved the public SSH key in alibuild.pub):

openstack keypair create --public-key alibuild.pub alibuild

This only needs to be done the first time you create a VM.

Specify a few parameters for the machine you want to spawn:

MACHINE_NAME=<alibuildXX/alimetalXX>
FLAVOR=<OpenStack flavor name, see below>
VOLSIZE=<"1000GB" for VMs, empty for physical machines>

For virtual machines, FLAVOR is m2.2xlarge. For physical/bare-metal machines, this will be a string given by CERN IT, probably of the form p1.dlXXXXXXX.S513-V-IPXX. You can list the flavors you have access to by running openstack flavor list.

To spawn a machine you need to use the ai-bs wrapper, which will take care of provisioning the machine and putting it in Foreman, so that it will receive from it the Puppet configuration:

ai-bs -g alibuild/mesos/slave --alma9                              \
      --foreman-environment production                             \
      --nova-sshkey alibuild --nova-flavor "$FLAVOR"               \
      --landb-mainuser alice-agile-admin                           \
      --landb-responsible alice-agile-admin                        \
      ${VOLSIZE:+--nova-attach-new-volume "vdb=$VOLSIZE:type=io1"} \
      "$MACHINE_NAME"

This will spawn a new machine. You can check the boot status either in the OpenStack GUI or via openstack server show -f yaml "$MACHINE_NAME". Of course you should change the name of the machine (<alibuildXX> in the example).

For bare-metal machines in particular, a flavor being listed in openstack flavor list does not guarantee that there is capacity for more hosts within it. If you create a host and it is immediately in an "ERROR" state, try another flavor or contact CERN IT.

Machines may require a manual reboot to apply updates to the kernel command line.

In particular, make sure that /proc/cmdline contains systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0. If not, reboot the machine.

In order to make sure that the machine is correctly up and running, you should:

ping it
ssh to it
run puppet agent -t -v until no errors are reported
execute e.g. docker pull registry.cern.ch/alisw/slc9-builder to force-pull the builder image.

Rebuilding a master#

Rebuilding a master is a potentially disruptive operation, since our mesos setup requires at least 2 masters to be up and running in order to schedule new jobs. Therefore before you actually decide to rebuild one you should:

Discuss with your collegueas whether that's a good idea.
Make sure that the other two masters are properly functioning.
If the master is the currently leading master, force a leadership transition to one of the other two machines before the rebuild (Optional, since failower will take care of that).

In order to perform the rebuild you need to do:

Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

Actually rebuild the machine

ai-rebuild-vm --alma9 alimesosXX

It can take up to one hour for the process to complete.

In order to make sure that the machine is correctly up and running, you should:
ping it
ssh to it
run puppet agent -t -v until no errors are reported

Rebuilding an agent#

Rebuilding an agent is potentially a problem, since the Nomad agent might be doing something, e.g. building a release, which should not be in general interrupted. Therefore you need to:

Discuss with your collegueas whether that's a good idea.
Verify that the machine is not running any particularly important task, by looking at the report in the Nomad GUI. If in doubt, ask.

In order to perform the rebuild you need to do:

Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing (for build machines):

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

or, for the physical machines:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing - physical nodes")

depending on which project the machine belongs to.

Actually rebuild the machine

ai-rebuild-vm --alma9 alibuildXX

In order to make sure that the machine is correctly up and running, you should:
ping it
ssh to it
run puppet agent -t -v until no errors are reported. If you keep having errors after a few runs, report them.

Deleting a build infrastructure VM#

Documentation to delete a VM is found in the Configuration Management User Guide.

The recipe for destoying agents is:

Ask yourself why you are deleting the VM. Do it only if you want to get rid of it for good. If you want to recreate it immediately after, e.g. to handle some irreversible fault on the installation, you might first want to try rebuilding it, since it will be much faster.
Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

- Delete the VM with ai-kill <alibuildXX> - Delete the previously attached volumes.

Rebooting a server#

In case there is an issue with any of the agents, a hard reboot can be attempted to bring it back to a working state. This can be done via the OpenStack GUI, in the Instances tab, or doing:

Login to aiadm.cern.ch.
Set up your OpenStack environment by doing:

eval $(ai-rc "ALICE Release Testing")

- Actually reboot <server name>

openstack server reboot --hard <server name>

in case the GUI is not functional.

Master backups#

Backup of the Consul server is done via CERN TSM. This needs to be renewed regularly and CERN IT will ping by email about it. Agents are not backed up.