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HIL - Introduction

HIL is a low-level tool for reserving physical machines and connecting them via isolated networks. It does not prescribe a particular method for imaging/managing said machines, allowing the user to use any solution of their choosing.

HIL keeps track of available resources in a database, which a system administrator must populate initially.

This includes information such as:

• What machines are available
• What network interfaces they have
• Where those NICs are connected (what port on what switch)

From there, a regular user may:

• Reserve physical machines
• Create isolated logical networks
• Create "headnodes," which are small virtual machines usable for management/provisioning purposes
• Connect network interfaces belonging to physical and/or headnodes to logical networks.
• Reboot their machines, view the serial consoles -- aditionaly such management features may exist in the future.

A typical user workflow might look like:

1. Reserve some machines.
2. Create a logical "provisioning" network.
3. Connect a NIC from each machine to the provisioning network. In particular, one could connect a NIC from which the machine will attempt to boot.
4. Create a headnode, and attach it to the provisioning network
5. Log in to the headnode, set up a PXE server, reboot the nodes, and deploy an operating system on them via the network.

Requirements

Required software/hardware for running a production HIL include:

• Network switches:
  • At least one switch from the Cisco Nexus 5xxx or Dell PowerConnect 55xx families
  • For environments including more than one switch, all VLANs must be trunked to all managed switches
• A single node that has the following:
  • A webserver capable of supporting the WSGI standard (Apache/mod_wsgi is the only one tested)
  • python 2.7, with the ability to install packages via pip
  • Access to:
    • The Internet or intranet (a way for users to connect to the HIL service)
    • The administrative telnet IP on the managed switches
  • Currently only CentOS and RHEL 7.x have been tested, though any node that otherwise meets these requirements should function.
• Database: a Postgres database server. Sqlite works but is not recommended for production.

For IPMI proxy functionality : * Network access from the HIL service node to the IPMI interfaces of node under management * Nodes that support IPMI v2+ * A recent version of ipmitool installed on the HIL service node

For headnode functionality:

• A recent Linux version for the HIL service node that has libvirt with KVM installed
• Some number of VM templates
• A trunk port connected between the switch and HIL service node that carries all VLANs accessible from HIL

Documentation

• The full documentation is availalbe at ReadTheDocs in a beautiful and easy to navigate web interface.
• The docs directory contains all the documentation in .rst and .md format
• Examples contains examples of config files, templates for creating headnode VM images and a script to register nodes with HIL.

Mass Open Cloud

This project is part of the larger Mass Open Cloud. For a description of the team and other information, see https://github.com/CCI-MOC/moc-public/blob/master/README.md.