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Working with Hardware

As for your initial deployment, you should ensure that all hardware is appropriately burned in before adding it to production. Run software that uses the hardware to its limits—maxing out RAM, CPU, disk, and network. Many options are available, and normally double as benchmark software, so you also get a good idea of the performance of your system.

Adding a Compute Node

If you find that you have reached or are reaching the capacity limit of your computing resources, you should plan to add additional compute nodes. Adding more nodes is quite easy. The process for adding compute nodes is the same as when the initial compute nodes were deployed to your cloud: use an automated deployment system to bootstrap the bare-metal server with the operating system and then have a configuration-management system install and configure OpenStack Compute. Once the Compute service has been installed and configured in the same way as the other compute nodes, it automatically attaches itself to the cloud. The cloud controller notices the new node(s) and begins scheduling instances to launch there.

If your OpenStack Block Storage nodes are separate from your compute nodes, the same procedure still applies because the same queuing and polling system is used in both services.

We recommend that you use the same hardware for new compute and block storage nodes. At the very least, ensure that the CPUs are similar in the compute nodes to not break live migration.

Adding an Object Storage Node

Adding a new object storage node is different from adding compute or block storage nodes. You still want to initially configure the server by using your automated deployment and configuration-management systems. After that is done, you need to add the local disks of the object storage node into the object storage ring. The exact command to do this is the same command that was used to add the initial disks to the ring. Simply rerun this command on the object storage proxy server for all disks on the new object storage node. Once this has been done, rebalance the ring and copy the resulting ring files to the other storage nodes.

Note

If your new object storage node has a different number of disks than the original nodes have, the command to add the new node is different from the original commands. These parameters vary from environment to environment.

Replacing Components

Failures of hardware are common in large-scale deployments such as an infrastructure cloud. Consider your processes and balance time saving against availability. For example, an Object Storage cluster can easily live with dead disks in it for some period of time if it has sufficient capacity. Or, if your compute installation is not full, you could consider live migrating instances off a host with a RAM failure until you have time to deal with the problem.