Creating a GigaSpaces Cluster On Premise

 

gsctl is a simple CLI tool for creating GigaSpaces clusters. You can create a cluster in minutes with a single command – run java -jar gsctl.jar create.

In this topic, you will learn how to create, provision and install a GigaSpaces cluster on the on-premise machines, and then remove it by doing the following:

  • Create a GigaSpaces cluster.
  • Deploy GigaSpaces services in the cluster.
  • Tear down the GigaSpaces cluster.

Prerequisites

Before beginning to work with the gsctl tool, you must do the following:

  • Verify that Java 8 or higher is installed on your local workstation.

  • Disable the password prompt when using sudo in your on-premise machines.
  • Install Unzip on all the cluster machines
  • Ensure that you have a single pem file for all your on-premise machines
  • Verify connectivity to all the machines from your workstation
  • Centos machines only - disable the firewall (firewalld service) and make sure it is set to stay disabled on start (for example, when the machine reboots)

Downloading and Running the Utility

The gsctl tool can be downloaded from a dedicated repository. You can start an interactive shell for gsctl and run commands using short notation, or you can run commands from outside the interactive shell (from the OS shell) by adding java -jar gsctl.jar before each command.

You must run the utility from the same directory where you placed the gsctl.jar file.

To download the gsctl utility and launch the interactive shell:

  1. Create an empty directory on your machine. In this example, the drive is C: and the directory name is gsDemo.

  2. Download the most current version of the utility (gsctl.jar file) from the dedicated repository to the directory you created (gsDemo).

  3. To start the interactive shell, open a command window and type the following:

    java -jar gsctl.jar
    java -jar C:\gsDemo\gsctl.jar

Creating a GigaSpaces Cluster

Follow the steps in the procedure to create a GigaSpaces cluster and deploy the GigaSpaces services. All of the procedures on this page describe the short notation as used from inside the interactive shell.

To create a cluster:

  1. Create an empty directory on your machine. In this example, the directory name is gsDemo.

  2. Download the most current version of the gsctl.jar file from the dedicated repository to the directory you created (gsDemo) and extract the contents.
  3. Add the pem file to this directory.
  4. Open a command window and type the following to define a cluster called gs_demo_cluster:

    init --on-prem=1 --cluster-name=gs_demo_cluster

    This command creates also a cluster.yaml file. Modify the yaml file as follows:

    • keyName - name of your pem file (without the .pem extension)

    • userName - name of the on-premise machine being used to create the cluster

    • profiles - the on-premise worker (client) name, along with the IP addresses of the host machines

      You must have 3 masters (gsManagers) and at least 1 worker.

    name: "gs_demo_cluster"
    gsManagers: 3
    clusterComponents:
    - type: "OnPremise"
     name: "OnPremise_1"
     userName: "root"
     keyName: "sshkey"
     masters:
     label: "GS Cluster [gs_demo_cluster] Master Group"
    profiles:
     - name: "default on premise master name"
    tags: []
    hosts:
     - "172.17.0.2"
     - "172.17.0.3"
     - "172.17.0.4"
    workers:
    label: "GS Cluster [gs_demo_cluster] Worker Group"
    profiles:
    - name: "default on premise worker name"
    tags: []
    hosts:
    - "172.17.0.5"
    - "172.17.0.6"
    - "172.17.0.7"
  5. To create the cluster, run the following command:

    create

    Here is sample output from the create command:

Deploying the GigaSpaces Services

After your cluster is up and running, you can deploy GigaSpaces services and microservices.

The deploy operation can be done using the GigaSpaces CLI (Deploy with Command Line), the REST API (Deploy with REST) and the Ops Manager (Deploy and Undeploy Services in Ops Manager).

The cluster is started as secured. Access to the Ops Manager and the REST API requires the user to be authenticated. Three built-in users are pre-defined: gs-admin, gs-mngr and gs-viewer. The password is the Nomad token from the output of the create command.

The gsctl tool comes with sample processor (stateful) and feeder (stateless) services in the default artifacts repository. To deploy them, use 'data-processor.jar' and 'data-feeder.jar' in the URL in the deploy screen.

For more information about the artifact repository, see the Managing the GigaSpaces Product Version topic.

Monitoring the GigaSpaces Services

After you deploy your GigaSpaces services and microservices, you can monitor them using the following built-in web interfaces:

  • Ops Manager
  • Grafana
  • Zipkin

To access the administration and monitoring tools:

  1. Run the following command:

    list-services

    This returns all the services with their URLs.

  2. Copy any of the GigaSpacesManager URLs into your browser to open Ops Manager and view the deployed GigaSpaces services.

  3. Copy the grafana URL to your browser to open Grafana and navigate to the pre-defined dashboards:

  4. Select the Telegraf system metrics dashboard in Grafana to view the cluster metrics:

Removing a GigaSpaces Cluster

You can delete your cluster when you no longer need it, in order to release the cloud resources.

To remove the GigaSpaces cluster:

In the directory where you created the cluster, run the following command:

gsctl.jar destroy

This tears down the cluster.