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August 18th, 2016 04:00
Smarts running in containers?
I've done some experiments running Smarts domain managers (SAM, OI, IP AM-PM) in Docker containers on a CentOS host and in LXD containers on an Ubuntu host; and they seem to run just fine. Is this something that EMC and/or the community is interested in pursuing? We typically use a separate IP AM-PM per customer, some of which only poll tens of devices; so this looks like a means to get better density and easier upgrades.
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StanislavL
3 Posts
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August 22nd, 2016 00:00
On related topic. We have had many discussions about Docker as well as a whole DevOps approach for SAS components within our team. Smarts configurations in general are held in files. This makes it almost a perfect candidate for templating and automation. Therefore we have decided to pursue Smarts deployment automation via Ansible. It's still on-going however it already shows very positive trends and results.
On the other hand Watch4net (M&R) seem to be a bigger nut to crack as many configs are UI based. Although many bits are driven via XML configs as well as SOAP, REST APIs; these APIs are largely undocumented posing challenges.
It was interesting seeing a following note in one of the M&R release notes: EMP-17920:The EMC M&R software can be supported in a Docker installation deployment.
So yeah, it would be nice to hear from you how you are getting on with Smarts.
Thanks,
Stan
Peter_F1
21 Posts
1
August 22nd, 2016 01:00
Hi Stan
Interesting that you mention Ansible. For some time now we have been maintaining our Smarts installations and configurations via Puppet (similar to Ansible in many ways). Much of it involves variable interpolations in template files, but there are also some custom extensions to Puppet to be able to (re-)start domain managers when configurations change. It seems that Ansible has been bought by RedHat, and it is now part of the RedHat provisioning suite, so maybe its a good candidate for Smarts automation.
We also do a lot of Watch4Net configuration via XML template files, but as you mentioned, there are some things that require use of the GUI. Fortunately the collector configurations are all XML-based - that is where we have the greatest volumes.
- Peter
Peter_F1
21 Posts
0
August 24th, 2016 00:00
Hi Doug
One of the main interests is better resource utilisation - we currently have a virtual machine per customer network that runs SAM, IP-AM-PM, NCM device server and Watch4net collectors. The number of customers runs into the hundreds. In some cases only ~10 customer devices are monitored, so having to have 3G RAM available for NCM makes for big VMs for small jobs. If we could use one VM running multiple containers (using separate interfaces for customer data isolation), we could get better density.
- Peter