Cloud playbooks

Ansible playbooks to boot resources in the cloud for the sciCORE courses

Short description on how these playbooks work

Inside the ansible folder you will find different playbooks for the different scicore courses. Playbooks with same name prefix belong to the same course. e.g. these are the playbooks to boot a slurm cluster

ansible/slurm-cluster-01-boot-openstack.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-02-common.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-03-configure-nfs.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-04-configure-slurm-daemons.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-05-configure-user-accounts.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-06-configure-rstudio.yml
ansible/slurm-cluster-07-configure-monitoring.yml

First playbook will use Terraform to boot the cloud the resources and will create an ansible static inventory.

Rest of the playbooks will use static inventory to connect to the cloud resources and configure them.

Variables naming convention

If a variable starts with prefix local_ it means it's a "playbook var" defined only for this playbook.

If a variable has any other prefix different from local_ it's a role variable. It's used to override a var in one of the roles in ansible/requirements.yml

How to use these playbooks

Prepare the environment

Download this git repo

$> git clone https://github.com/scicore-unibas-ch/ansible-playbook-scicore-courses-cloud.git
$> cd ansible-playbook-scicore-courses-cloud

Install the required Python dependencies in a virtualenv

Tested with Python-3.6.6:

$> virtualenv venv_cloud
$> source venv_cloud/bin/activate
(venv_cloud)$> pip install -r requirements.txt

Install the required ansible dependencies

(venv_cloud)$> ansible-galaxy role install -r ansible/requirements.yml -p ansible/roles/
(venv_cloud)$> ansible-galaxy collection install -r ansible/requirements.yml -p ansible/collections/

Download terraform and add it to your PATH

$> mkdir ~/bin/
$> curl -o /tmp/terraform.zip https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.15.3/terraform_0.15.3_linux_amd64.zip
$> unzip /tmp/terraform.zip -d ~/bin/
$> export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

Configure authentication with the Cloud environment

Go to your cloud webui and download the auth RC file. In openstack this is usually located in the top right corner of the webui.

(venv_cloud)$> source openstack_auth.rc
(venv_cloud)$> source <(openstack complete)

At this point you should be able to interact with the cloud API from the CLI. Try these commands. They will be useful to define you config file:

(venv_cloud)$> openstack image list
(venv_cloud)$> openstack flavor list
(venv_cloud)$> openstack network list
(venv_cloud)$> openstack server list

If these commands don't work double check that your openstack login info is correct and try to execute openstack image list -v to get a more verbose output

Prepare you config file

(venv_cloud)$> cp config/slurm_cluster_switch_cloud.yml.example config/slurm_cluster_switch_cloud.yml

Now edit config/slurm_cluster_switch_cloud.yml and adapt it to your needs based on the output from previous commands. Most variables are self-descriptive. TO-DO: Improve the config docs

when defining the number of nodes to boot or the disk size double check in the webui if your cloud quota is big enough

Booting a Slurm cluster

$> ./slurm-cluster.sh

Connecting to the slurm cluster

$> ssh -F ~/.ssh/slurm_cluster_cloud.cfg slurm-login

Running an interactive command in every machine in the slurm cluster

From you ansible control host:

$> ansible slurm_cluster_all -i ansible/inventory/slurm_cluster -m shell -a 'uname -r'

$> ansible slurm_cluster_all -i ansible/inventory/slurm_cluster -m shell -a 'yum -y install htop'

Delete the Slurm cluster

$> cd terraform/slurm-cluster-openstack/
$> terraform destroy
$> openstack keypair delete slurm_cluster_cloud