warewulf v4 (work in progress)

In a nutshell, to install and start provisioning nodes, do the following:

####Build Warewulf and dependencies:

Warewulf is programmed in GoLang, so you will need to also install a Go compiler on your system. The easiest way to do this on RHEL and CentOS is by using the Go packages that are included in EPEL. In addition there are some dependencies that Warewulf will reuire to operate properly and because this is a quick HOWTO, we disable the firewall so any provisioning issues we have won't be caused by packets being dropped.

To install these and compile Warewulf, do the following:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install golang tftp-server dhcp

sudo systemctl stop firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

make all

Install Warewulf onto your host system:

The following command will install some of the Warewulf shared components into your host system. The locations of these paths and files are not yet configurable, so it can't be installed anywhere else.

The default install locations are:

• /var/warewulf: State data
• /etc/warewulf: Configuration data

sudo make install

Configure the controller:

Edit the file /etc/warewulf/warewulf.conf and ensure that you've set the appropriate configuration paramaters. Here are some of the defaults for reference:

ipaddr: 192.168.1.1
netmask: 255.255.255.0
warewulf:
  port: 9873
  secure: true
dhcp:
  enabled: true
  range start: 192.168.1.150
  range end: 192.168.1.200
  template: default

Once it has been configured, you can have Warewulf configure the services:

sudo ./wwctl service dhcp -c
# sudo ./wwctl service tftp -c

Use the controller's kernel and default VNFS into your "default" node profile:

Next we are going to start configuring Warewulf. Use the following two commands to set the kernel and VNFS for the "default" profile which all nodes will utilize, and then configure node specific information as you add a new node to the configuration:

sudo ./wwctl profile set default -K $(uname -r) -V docker://warewulf/centos-8
sudo ./wwctl node add n0000.cluster --netdev eth0 -I 192.168.1.100 -M 255.255.255.0 -G 192.168.1.1 -H 00:0c:29:23:8b:48

Build the kernel, VNFS, and overlays:

Once you have added the node, you can start building the needed bootable components. There are three major groups of data to provision:

1. Kernel: This is the boot kernel and driver overlay pair. The wwctl kernel build command will create these files. The -a option will scan your configuration looking for all needed kernel images and then go through and build them all. The caveat is that all these kernels must be installed to your host controller node.

2. VNFS: The "VNFS" is the "Virtual Node File System", and that is the template that nodes will be provisioned to boot into. Warewulf v4 can support standard "chroot" style VNFS formats (e.g. same as Warewulf 3 and/or Singularity Sandboxes) as well as OCI (Open Container Initiative) formats which include Docker containers and containers in Docker Hub. As you can see in the above wwctl profile set command, we configured the VNFS to be a container hosted in Docker Hub. This can also be a local path or a container in a docker-daemon.

3. Overlays: There are two types of overlays, "system" and "runtime". The difference is that the system overlay is provisioned before /sbin/init is called and the runtime overlay is provisioned after /sbin/init is called and is done from the booted operating system at periodic intervals (the time of this writing, it is ever 30 seconds).

sudo ./wwctl kernel build -a
sudo ./wwctl vnfs build -a
sudo ./wwctl overlay build -sa

Start the Warewulf daemon:

Once the above provisioning images are built, you can check the provisioning "rediness" and then begin booting nodes.

sudo ./wwctl ready
./warewulfd

Boot your compute node and watch it boot