The steps below will show how to create a Lustre Cluster on Microsoft'a Azure infrastructure. It will start with a Lustre template in the Azure marketplace.
You will need an Azure account.
Login to your account and go to the dashboard. You can get to the dashboard from anywhere by clicking on the blue "Microsoft Azure" in the upper left corner of the GUI.
To get started click on "New" to get ready to start deployments of a new instance of Lustre
In the search box that appears, type "lustre" and hit return. For some reason the completions that start to show up do not work as expected
choose the version ending in "GS" and choose "create". This will open the GUI to fill out the Lustre template.
In the screen that appears you will fill out the fields in the template.
Lustre Prefix Name - this will be prepended to the names of the lustre VM hosts. For example here it is specified as ldemo so our MGS node will be ldemomgs.
Admin Username - This is the username for the administor account. Here it is left at the default "azureuser".
Password Type - You can choose to use a password or a key. You can cut and paste a public key here. For windows you can load your private key into puttygen and save your public key. Its contents can be pasted here. Whatever you do here will be propagated to all the VMs in the Lustre Cluster.
Resource Group - Is the unique name for your group of resources (the resources that make up your Lustre cluster).
Location - Choose the Azure region you would like to deploy to from the drop down list.
When done hit "OK" to move to the next screen.
Public IP address name - This is the resource name for the public IP address. Not the hostname of the MGS which is what you will ssh into.
Domain name Label - This is the hostname of the public MGS node. Note that underneath the box is the rest of the public address.
Next click on th MGS VM Size to select the VM type for the MGS node.
Here you can choose the type of VM for the Management server (MGS). The current selection is outlined by the blue box. When done hit select in the right pane to chose the MGS and then OK to finish the MGS selection.
Next we will fill out the infomation for creating our Meta-Data server (MDS)
Fill out the name you would like for the Lustre filesytem and like the MGS choose the type of VM you would like to use.
First chose the number of Object Storage Servers (OSS) you would like to use from the drop down list.
Also choose the size of each of the 3 OSTs that will be attached to your OSS
Then select the type of VM for your OSS.
The next section is used to setup the storage class and the networking.
First give you storage account a name.
Then chose the durability and High Availablity features for your storage. See the section "Replication for Durability and High Availability" at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-introduction/ for an explanation of the different selections shown here.
Next to setup is the network that the lustre servers and clients will use. You can use an existing network if you have one. In the case we don't so we create a new one.
We give it a name and pick an /16 address range to use.
Next we setup the subnets, one for the server and one for the clients.
Name the subnets. You can also change the address ranges, but they need to be in the /16 range you specified above.
After section the OKs in the previous window, a summary of what has been entered is shown in the summary.
Read the terms of use and purchase your Lustre Filesystem.
Next you will see the dashboard with a spinning "deploying". It will take awhile. Occassionally it will notrefresh when it is done, so check on it occasionally by refreshing the page.
When it is done chose "resource groups" in the left pane and then your new resource group that you created.
You should see "succeeded" user "last deployment:
You will also see an "overview" of your resources in the resource group.
If you choose "deployments" you can see that the process was done in 4 separate deployments, If you chose the first one a summary will appear where you can see the MGS public address to use to SSH to your MGS and the link to the ganglia output that can be used to monitor the activity in your Lustre filesystem. Also shown is the mount command to use on your clients to mount the Lustre Filesystem.
If you need to access the other nodes in the cluster and you have used the key option, you have two options. The best method is to run a pagent and ssh with forwarding enabled so the MGS node can get the private key from your workstation. The other less secure way as you make you are exposing your private key would be to copy your private key to the MGS so it can be used to access the other nodes.
You can use this method to log in to your clients to run benchmarks or try out some applications.
following is what the dashboard link will show
Replication for Durability and High Availability
Overview
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