Nirin - Quick Start Guide

Step-by-step guide

1. Login to https://cloud.nci.org.au with your NCI credentials. Your OpenStack tenant would be same as your project ID. If you are part of multiple projects, then please choose the appropriate tenant.

2. If you are using Tenjin for the first time, Click “Access & Security” and create/add your KeyPair. On Linux or Mac, you can “cat” your public key and paste it here. You may give it any name.
   
   

   This is one time only operation. However depending on your workflow/security model you may want to have a number of key pairs.

3. Click on the “Instances Tab” and press “Launch Instance” to start a virtual machine.

4.  Click “Details” and select appropriate Image Name and Flavour.
   
   
   

   Flavours Explained

   NCI offers a number of virtual machine flavours to suit the needs of a research group. The name of the flavour gives you details of the number of cpus, memory and local disk space.

   E.g.

   8c16m80d 
   - CPUS: 8 
   - Memory: 16GB 
   - Local Disk: 80 GB*

   Local Disk and Cinder Volume: Local disk is only for operating system and scratch. This disk is local to the compute blade and it is NOT backed up. The main software engineering of OpenStack Cloud requires you to have a virtual machine deployment process that is reproducible. We strongly recommend using puppet or other alternates to deploy the operating system. For persistent storage, NCI provides cinder volume and projects should use cinder volume to store critical data e.g. web catalogs and important data. It may also be noted while cinder volume (based on Ceph) is replicated, we strongly suggest projects to ask /pay for long term storage on NCI’s tape drives. The data on NCI’s tape drives is backed up across two remote sites. For more information please send an email to help@nci.org.au.

   Please note that local disk provided to your VM on Tenjin is an SSD.

   
   

   Overview of storage types

   Storage Type	Device	Intended use	Pros	Cons
   Root disk	/dev/sda, automatically mounted on /	Operating system and applications	High IOPS and throughput (Solid State Disks in RAID 0) Included in instance snapshots	Limited size No redundancy Deleted when virtual machine is deleted Not automatically backed up
   Ephemeral disk	/dev/sdb, automatically mounted on /mnt	Temporary storage (scratch space)	High IOPS and throughput (Solid State Disks in RAID 0)	Limited size No redundancy Deleted when virtual machine is deleted Not included in instance snapshots Not automatically backed up
   Attached volumes aka Block Storage aka Cinder (Backed by Ceph)	/dev/sdc and subsequent, not automatically mounted	Persistent storage of large volumes of data	Large size High throughput Built-in redundancy Exists until deleted by owner Can be detached from one VM, then re-attached to another. Can create point-in-time volume snapshots	Lower IOPS Not automatically backed up

   
   

5. Click “Access & Security” and select the Key pair you want to use for logging into the virtual machine once it is provisioned. 

6. Click “Networking” and select the IP address. Your project may have multiple IP address associated depending upon the requirements. 

7. Click "Launch".

8. Use “ssh –i /path/to/keypair root@IP.ADDRESS” to access the virtual machine.

9. We do not recommend putting in useful data on the VDA (root) and (VDB) ephemeral storage. At the time of creation of the project, NCI gives 10GB (minimum) quota for block storage (we use Ceph).

10. Click “Volumes” tab and create a volume.
    

11. Attach the volume it to the virtual machine. It will most probably get attached as /dev/vdc but it is always a good idea to check. On your virtual machine fdisk –l command will give you a clear idea.

    fdisk sample output

    [root@awesome]# fdisk -l
    
    Disk /dev/vda: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1305 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x000c62bf
    
       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/vda1   *           1        1306    10484736   83  Linux
    
    Disk /dev/vdb: 32.2 GB, 32212254720 bytes
    16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 62415 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00000000
    
    
    Disk /dev/vdc: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes
    16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20805 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00000000
    

12. Create a filesystem on /dev/vdc 

    [root@awesome /]# mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdc

    mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)

    
    

13. Mount the volume on your virtual machine. 

    [root@awesome /]# mkdir /data; mount /dev/vdc /data

Access Global File-systems

NFS Export Policy for global file-systems to Nirin