Ansible provisioning/maintenance tasks for Cassandra. Can be used to install & manage upgrades for an Apache Cassandra or Datastax (DCE or DSE+Opscenter) based Cassandra cluster & Spark
Usage:
- Create the servers for Cassandra and other services (e.g Datastax OpsCenter, Spark master)
- Define an Ansible inventory (see inventory/example.hosts) for your environment
- Run the playbook to install Cassandra + other services
Inventory configuration:
| Inventory group | Variable | Options | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cassandra_nodes | dc | DC1, DC2, ... | - | data center of node |
| cassandra_nodes | rack | RAC1, RAC2, ... | - | rack of node |
| cassandra_nodes | repair_weekday | MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI,SAT,SUN | - | day(s) to run repair on node |
| cassandra_nodes | repair_start_hour | 00-23 | 03 | hour to start cron based repair |
| cassandra_nodes | repair_start_minute | 00-59 | 0 | minute to start cron based repair |
| cassandra_nodes | seed | true, false | - | is the node a seed |
| cassandra_nodes | node_ip | true, false | - | IP for internal cluster communications |
| cassandra_nodes | spark_enabled | true, false | false | enable Spark on node (DSE only) |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_enabled | true, false | false | enable S3 backups |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_environment | aws, riakcs | - | environment for S3 backups |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_host | host | - | S3 host (for non-AWS) |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_bucket | bucket | - | S3 bucket where to store backups |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_keyspaces | keyspace,keyspace,... | - | Cassandra keyspaces to backup (comma separated) |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_access_key | access_key | - | S3 access key |
| cassandra_nodes | s3_backup_secret_key | secret_key | - | S3 secret key |
| cassandra_nodes | local_jmx | yes, no | yes | JMX local only |
| cassandra_nodes | admin_jmx_remote_password | password | - | JMX password for admin (readwrite) |
| cassandra_nodes | monitoring_jmx_remote_password | password | - | JMX password for monitoring (readonly) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | |
| opscenter_nodes | node_ip | true, false | - | IP for internal cluster communications |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | |
| all_cassandra_nodes | data_disk_environment | ephemeral_raid, directory_symlink, create_data_directory | ephemeral_raid | data disk options |
| all_cassandra_nodes | data_disk_symlink | symlink name | - | name of symlink when using "directory_symlink" data_disk_environment |
| all_cassandra_nodes | deployment_environment | aws, euca | - | environment for installation |
| all_cassandra_nodes | install_version | apache, dce, dse | - | Cassandra to install (apache=Apache Cassandra, dce=Datastax Community Edition, dse=Datastax Enterprise Edition) |
| all_cassandra_nodes | ignore_shutdown_errors | true, false | false | Should we ignore errors with graceful node shutdown |
| all_cassandra_nodes | dse_username | DSE username | - | DSE username (only for DSE install) |
| all_cassandra_nodes | dse_password | DSE password | - | DSE password (only for DSE install) |
Requirements:
- Ansible 2.0 or later
- Nodes running Ubuntu 14.04 or later
- Node have the following installed: git
Running:
- Check out main cassandra.yml comments for typical running options (e.g. new install, upgrade, cron/backup only updates etc)
Data disk environment options: Deployment data options are controlled by the required "data_disk_environment" environment variable, which can be set for all nodes or per-node basis. The supported environments are:
- ephemeral_raid: Creates a RAID-0 array for local ephemeral drives. Works also for a single ephemeral drive. (default)
- directory_symlink: Creates a symlink from /ephemeral to "data_disk_symlink".
- create_data_directory: Creates /data directory on root device.
Spark setup: Typical way of setting up the environment would be to define 2 Cassandra data centers: one for real-time transactions (plain Cassandra) and another for analytics workloads (Cassandra with co-located Spark nodes). You can also use the playbook without installing Spark.
Notes:
- DCE to Apache Cassandra migration: As Datastax dropped support for DCE (3.0.9 is the last supported version), it is recommended you migrate to Apache Cassandra based setup (or run DSE). The migration path we took in our clusters was an round-robin DCE->Apache migration (graceful shutdown of node, removal of DCE, running the playbook with default setup on the node (installs & configures Apache Cassandra and keeps the old node data)). You'll probably want to set ignore_shutdown_errors=true so that the playbook will run when the old binaries have been remove & service isn't running.
