Clusterducks

Hardware Requirements

Though small networks with light workloads can get away with very little, larger networks may want more. And then there is a set of minimum essentials before clusterducks will even work.

Essentials

  • The panel interface requires a PHP-friendly webserver (like apache or nginx)
    • lighttpd is not supported because we don't have working redirect rules. Patches are welcomed!
    • Should be hosted on a trusted system. Essentially, whoever can access your webserver will be able to access your hosts. Keep your panel secure!
    • Once a network is set up, your panel may be migrated to a self-hosted VM (Chicken/Egg)
    • The panel can use MongoDB for storing statistics. All items have a single document each (as of v0.9.4) with a limit of 16MB per item (device, group, volume, server, snapshot, etc all consume 16MB for statistics)
    • The more devices, the more of a load your panel will bear for statistics and health monitoring. Disable MongoDB to eliminate historical archiving or increase the resources allocated to the control panel
  • A tunnel service is required to broker API requests
    • Storage / compute server API access can be bothersome because of firewalls, NAT
    • We provide a small tunnel service based on OpenSSH that you can host
    • The tunnel service must have a publicly accessible DNS hostname that has only port tcp/22 (SSH) open for incoming agent connections
    • The tunnel service must have a privately accessible IP (IPSEC, LAN, VPN etc) directly from the control panel with all ports open and available
    • Since it is very lightweight, the tunnel service does not rely on heavy hardware for large installations
  • Netboot servers typically run Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu 14.04+
    • Old servers can power many bare metal workstations; AMD Opteron 2210 with 16G RAM + 1Gbit LAN runs 30 systems comfortably, with plenty of room to grow
    • More servers = better
    • Storage is mirrored across servers, does not provide a traditional cluster like Ceph
    • 1Gbit for your netboot devices is good, 10Gbit is great. Try to fit the server with a 10Gbit link, and each workstation with 1Gbit
    • Must be configured with HTTPS - our installer will do this for you

Unless all of your components (panel, tunnel, storage) are on the same LAN, basic internet service is required for regular DB updates.

Optional considerations

  • User data storage
    • A user data store should be used for persistent data, such as documents and multimedia. This can be done with clusterducks-provided vDisks or external file shares.
  • Dedicated network for iSCSI traffic
    • Some sensitive workloads or environments would definitely benefit from the increase in security and performance of network segregation
  • iSCSI HBA for Windows Servers
    • As long as the boot order is configured appropriately, an iSCSI HBA could be used for reliable volume management in Windows Server family operating systems that have poor results when directly booting via iBFT.