Quick Start
This tutorial should get you from zero, to running your first Danube Cloud Community Edition compute node node.
The first server in your Danube Cloud data center is a little bit special, and in the past is was also called "head node".
You might have already checked out our GitHub repository and found out that the Danube Cloud consists of many components. DON'T PANIC :) you don't need to assemble the components by yourself, unless you are interested in contributing or extending Danube Cloud with your own. To set up a Danube Cloud compute node you will need the following items:
- One free range physical server (you need to be able to plug in prepared USB installation media)
- USB drive with at least 8GB capacity
- First compute node image
- Configuration information for your new Compute node (see list below)
Before you start you should check your hardware against our requirements and HW compatibility list. However, any reasonably new server should work.
- CPU: Intel with VT-x and EPT support
- RAM: minimum of 4GB
- Hard drives: SSD, SAS, SATA. Preferably without any hardware RAID (ZFS likes to have direct access to disks).
We assume you are using a Linux machine to prepare the bootable USB drive. To prepare the bootable USB drive on different operating systems check our USB preparation guide.
First download the latest Head node image from http://download.erigones.org/esdc/usb/stable/.
Note that Head node images have a esdc-ce-hn-* prefix as opposed to Compute nodes, which are denoted by esdc-ce-cn-*.
$ wget http://download.erigones.org/esdc/usb/stable/esdc-ce-hn-latest.img.gz
$ sha1sum esdc-ce-hn-latest.img.gz
ea0efd822302816d1f6690898870cf2fd985951f esdc-ce-hn-latest.img.gz
Check the SHA1 of your .img.gz against corresponding .notes file http://download.erigones.org/esdc/usb/stable/esdc-ce-hn-latest.notes.
Copy the image to your USB
# dd bs=1MB if=esdc-ee-hn-2.4.0.img of=/dev/sdX
This may take a while.
Once the dd command has finished copying the image, take the USB to your server, plug it in and start/restart the server.
You will be greeted with a GRUB boot menu. Select the first option. Next you will enter the configuration dialog, where you will be asked to provide Head node configuration information.
In case you are re-installing a server with Danube Cloud or SmartOS, you should read the re-installation section in our User Guide.
- Data Center name: name of your data center
- Network card: which interface will be used for admin network
- Admin Network IP: IP of the Head Node on admin network
- Admin Network mask: size of you admin network
- Default gateway: default gateway on your admin network
- DNS servers: your DNS servers (e.g.: 8.8.8.8)
- Domain name: the domain name of your compute node
- Default DNS search domain: usually the same as your domain name
- Management IP: IP address of the management VM
- Configuration master password: will be required during compute node installation
- Disk pool configuration: Configuration of the main zpool (called zones)
- Administrator's email address:
During installation you will be asked whether to install to HDD or not. The HDD configuration is out of the scope of this quick-start guide. Please consult the official User Guide for more information.
At the end of the installation, information about your current Danube Cloud configuration will be displayed.
The important information, that you need to save for future use, is the monitoring username/password.
Navigate your web browser to the management IP address that you entered during installation and start using Danube Cloud.
