Automated Gluster cluster creation for testing

Setting up an identical cluster as that of users' when trying to reproduce any issue is not a simple task when you are working in distributed systems. This usually consists of installing the operating system by hand and then remembering to do every tiny configuration change that is required to complete the setup on every machine in the setup. Realizing that I forgot to set a selinux boolean or enable a port in firewall after an hour of debugging is not a happy place to be in.


Now, I have arrived at a setup which does not get on my nerves. I use combination of two tools to get the work done. The first is a tool that I wrote when I found myself editing Vagrantfile a lot when trying to scale the setup by altering the parameters. It is called vagrant-cluster-creator . The second tool that I use is gdeploy , which is what you should use to configure and deploy Gluster if you want consistent setups.


What you need to have the same setup as I do:
a. install vagrant, please refer to this blog post of mine
b. git clone https://github.com/raghavendra-talur/vagrant-cluster-creator.git
c. install gdeploy


Let us look at a demo of what I am talking about:



Remember, you can also tweak the config file that is passed to vagrant-cluster-creator to have really big setups. I have tried 12 nodes on my laptop because that is where I hit the memory limits. I am really looking for someone who would lend me a 128 GB RAM hypervisor to create a 100 node setup. My team mate, Ira Cooper, has a 51 node setup on his 32 GB RAM laptop using custom scripts and we are looking at doubling that number.

Hope this helps you to create a better setup for your testing needs.

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