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Ganglia scenario: using unicast through firewalls

Ganglia is an excellent open source tool to monitor (visualize) performance across large clusters of machines.
On Power it is especially useful for the visualization of used resources in each LPAR and the machine as whole.
See ganglia article in Ganglia for introduction and more detailed instructions not covered in this scenario.

The target of this ganglia setup was to group each machine as a cluster and all LPARs in it as nodes. Due to the network configuration multicast was not allowed. Additionally some machines and LPAR groups are behind a firewall, only SSH connections from the ganglia web server to the clients behind firewall are allowed.
To achieve this, we decided to use two head nodes on each p5 machine running gmond, and only one central server running ganglia-web and gmetad. The head nodes are included in the gmetad.conf on the server as sources for their clusters. You can define multiple sources for one cluster to achieve higher availability. We want to keep our setup as simple as possible, so all nodes inside one security zone and machine will have the same configuration although some of them will function as "head nodes".
To attach LPARs behind the firewall we will use ssh tunnel. In this example cluster (machine) p570-A and p570-B are in the same intranet zone with ganglia web frontend, cluster p570-C is in another security zone behind a firewall. Only connections from inside to outside and only SSH is allowed through firewall.

Web server rrdtool and gmetad installation (Red Hat 4 U4 on Power)

1. make sure apache2, php, libpng, freetype are installed
2. Download rrdtool-1.2.15-3.fc4.ppc.rpm from http://www.fedoraproject.org/extras/4/ppc/
3. Create symbolic link:

[root@op720-1-client2 ~]#  ln -s /usr/lib/librrd.so.2 /usr/lib/librrd.so.0

4. Install gmetad:

[root@op720-1-client2 ~]# rpm -Uvh --nodeps ganglia-gmetad-3.0.3-1.rhel.ppc64.rpm

5. Extract ganglia web package to /var/www/html

[root@op720-1-client2 ~]# cd /var/www/html/
[root@op720-1-client2 html]# tar zxvf /root/ganglia-web-3.0.3-1.tar.gz

Client installation

1. Copy apropriate gmond.conf to your clients /etc directory
2. Install ganglia-gmond* client rpm

Server configuration

1. edit /etc/gmetad.conf, set gridname

gridname "p5 grid"

2. edit /etc/gmetad.conf, set sources:

# Add your head nodes to the data source for each cluster (machine)
data_source "p570-A" A-headnode1, A-headnode2
data_source "p570-B" B-headnode1, B-headnode2
# If p570-C is behind the firewall we have to add local ports
# which will be tunneled
data_source "p570-C" localhost:4662 localhost:4663

Client configuration

In each cluster (machine) cluster name and head node names should differ

globals {                    
  daemonize = yes              
  setuid = yes             
  user = root
  debug_level = 0               
  max_udp_msg_len = 1472        
  mute = no             
  deaf = no             
  host_dmax = 0 /*secs */ 
  cleanup_threshold = 300 /*secs */ 
  gexec = no             
} 
cluster { 
  name = "p570-A" 
  owner = "" 
  latlong = "unspecified" 
  url = "unspecified" 
} 
udp_send_channel { 
 host = A-headnode1
 port = 8666 
} 
udp_send_channel {
 host = A-headnode2
 port = 8666
}
...
tcp_accept_channel { 
  port = 8649 
}

Creating SSH-Tunnel

1. Put the public key of the server in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file on the head node
2. Establish ssh tunnel

[root@op720-1-client2 ~]# ssh -fN -L 4662:c-headnode1:8649 c-headnode1
[root@op720-1-client2 ~]# ssh -fN -L 4663:c-headnode2:8649 c-headnode2