From GridCentric Labs Wiki

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 How to Install 2 Accessing the Repositories 2.1 Deb-based Distributions 2.2 RPM-based Distributions 3 Packages 3.1 Machine Images 3.2 Management Stack 3.3 Guest Images 3.4 Guest Utilities

Overview

The Copper system is easily installable as a set of packages available for all the most common Linux platforms, accompanied by a set of guest VM images that can be used to create, boot, and run virtual clusters.

How to Install

First, check out System Overview to get a good idea of what the overall structure of a Copper deployment looks like.

Visit the Installation Tutorial to get a complete step-by-step guide on installing Copper. The tutorial will walk you through the following steps:

Summary of Installation Steps

1. Add the GridCentric package repositories to your management computer's repository list.
2. Install the gridcentric-controller and gridcentric-www packages on your management machine(s)
   • These two packages provide the controller and admin console components of a Copper deployment
   • They both depend on the gridcentric-common package
3. Download and install the gridcentric-copper-images package on your fileserver machine (it can be the same as the management machine)
   • This package provides the boot images used to boot servers (Copper compute hosts) into the Copper hypervisor
   • Check the Booting page to learn more about booting Copper hosts.
4. Start the controller and admin console services
5. Boot all of the servers (compute hosts) which will contribute resources to your Copper deployment.

Accessing the Repositories

Deb-based Distributions

In order to access the GridCentric repositories from a deb-based distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, simply add the lines below into your /etc/apt/sources.list.

# The official GridCentric repositories.
deb http://downloads.gridcentriclabs.com/packages/deb gridcentric non-free

You will then need to run apt-get update before installing one of the above packages.

RPM-based Distributions

If you use an RPM-based distribution such as Fedora, you may access the repositories by creating a file such as /etc/yum.repos.d/gridcentric.repo containing the following.

[gridcentric]
name=GridCentric
baseurl=http://downloads.gridcentriclabs.com/packages/rpm
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

NOTE: Currently, some versions of CentOS/RHEL have problems downloading from the above Yum repository. If you are running CentOS or RHEL, please use the following entry in /etc/yum.repos.d/gridcentric.repo:

[gridcentric]
name=GridCentric
baseurl=http://downloads.gridcentriclabs.com/packages/centos-rpm
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Packages

Machine Images

Compute node images are available through the package gridcentric-copper-images. Alternately, host images are available in zip format here.

This package contains all the different boot images. The CD-ROM and USB images are found in /opt/gridcentric/images. The netboot images are found in /tftpboot/copper/nfsboot and /tftpboot/copper/netboot as reflected in /opt/gridcentric/samples/dnsmasq.conf.

Management Stack

gridcentric-common

The common packages (depended on by all of the other packages). All includes administrative tools, APIs, etc.

gridcentric-controller

The Copper controller, this is the piece that makes your cluster sing.

gridcentric-dns

The DNS server, that exposes GridCentric managed IP blocks through DNS.

gridcentric-www

The web interface. This allows for one-click administration.

gridcentric-visualizer

The visualizer is a nifty piece of demoware so that you can easily see the state of your cluster.

gridcentric-accounting

The accounting package contains basic logging and reporting capabilities so that you can audit usage, etc.

Guest Images

Guest VM images are available here.

Guest Utilities

gc-guest-base

The basic APIs and libraries. This includes a set of command line tools.

gc-modules-KERNEL-VERSION

Additional modules for GridCentric kernels. Note that KERNEL-VERSION above may be for example, 2.6.18.8-xen-gridcentric.

gcfs-module-KERNEL-VERSION

Module required to support attaching VFS containers. The KERNEL-VERSION would be similar to gc-modules.

gc-guest-mpi

MPIs wrappers and integration.

gc-guest-queuing

GridCentric grid queueing daemon, and administrative tools.

python-libgridcentric

Python bindings for the GridCentric guest API.