README

Ganeti Cluster tools (ganeti-htools)
====================================

These are some simple cluster tools for fixing common allocation
problems on Ganeti 2.0 clusters.

Note that these tools are most useful for bigger cluster sizes
(e.g. more than five or ten machines); at lower sizes, the
computations they do can also be done manually.

Available tools
---------------

Cluster rebalancer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The rebalancer uses a simple algorithm to try to get the nodes of the
cluster as equal as possible in their resource usage. It tries to
repeatedly move each instance one step, so that the cluster score
becomes better. We stop when no further move can improve the score.

For algorithm details and usage, see the man page hbal(1).

Cluster N+1 solver
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This program runs a very simple brute force algorithm over the instance
placement space in order to determine the shortest number of replace-disks
needed to fix the cluster. Note this means we won't get a balanced cluster,
just one that passes N+1 checks.

For algorithm details and usage, see the man page hn1(1).

.. note:: This program is deprecated, hbal should be used instead.

IAllocator plugin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ``hail`` iallocator plugin can be used for allocations of mirrored
and non-mirrored instances and for relocations of mirrored
instances. It needs to be installed in Ganeti's iallocator search
path—usually ``/usr/lib/ganeti/iallocators`` or
``/usr/local/lib/ganeti/iallocators``. See the man page hail(1).

Integration with Ganeti
-----------------------

The ``hbal`` and ``hn1`` programs can either get their input from text
files, or online from a cluster via RAPI. For online collection via
RAPI, the "-m" argument to both hn1 and hbal should specify the
cluster or master node name. ``hail`` uses the standard iallocator API
and thus doesn't need any special setup (just needs to be installed in
the right directory).

For generating the text files, a separate tool (hscan) is provided to
automate their gathering if RAPI is available, which is better since
it can extract more precise information. In case RAPI is not usable
for whatever reason, the following two commands should be run::

    gnt-node list -oname,mtotal,mnode,mfree,dtotal,dfree,offline \
      --separator '|' --no-headers > nodes
    gnt-instance list -oname,be/memory,sda_size,status,pnode,snodes \
      --separator '|' --no-head > instances

These two files should be saved under the names of *nodes* and
*instances*.

Installation
------------

If installing from source, you need a working ghc compiler (6.8 at
least) and some extra Haskell libraries which usually need to be
installed manually:

- json
- curl

Once these are available, just typing *make* in the top-level
directory should be enough.

Internal (implementation) documentation is available in the ``apidoc``
directory.

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