IM 1.16.0

IM is a tool to manage virtual infrastructures on Cloud deployments

IM - Infrastructure Manager

IM is a tool that deploys complex and customized virtual infrastructures on IaaS Cloud deployments (such as AWS, OpenStack, etc.). It eases the access and the usability of IaaS clouds by automating the VMI (Virtual Machine Image) selection, deployment, configuration, software installation, monitoring and update of the virtual infrastructure. It supports APIs from a large number of virtual platforms, making user applications cloud-agnostic. In addition it integrates a contextualization system to enable the installation and configuration of all the user required applications providing the user with a fully functional infrastructure.

Read the documentation and more at http://www.grycap.upv.es/im.

There is also an Infrastructure Manager YouTube reproduction list with a set of videos with demos of the functionality of the platform: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgPH186Qwh_37AMhEruhVKZSfoYpHkrUp.

Please acknowledge the use of this software in your scientific publications by including the following reference:

Miguel Caballer, Ignacio Blanquer, German Molto, and Carlos de Alfonso. "Dynamic management of virtual infrastructures". Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages 53-70, 2015, ISSN 1570-7873, DOI: 10.1007/s10723-014-9296-5.

Achievements

This software has received a gold badge according to the Software Quality Baseline criteria defined by the EOSC-Synergy project.

1 DOCKER IMAGE (Recommended Option)

The recommended option to use the Infrastructure Manager service is using the available docker image. A Docker image named ghcr.io/grycap/im has been created to make easier the deployment of an IM service using the default configuration. It is available in the IM Github Container registry.

How to launch the IM service using docker::

sudo docker run -d -p 8899:8899 -p 8800:8800 --name im ghcr.io/grycap/im

To make the IM data persistent you also have to specify a persistent location for the IM database using the IM_DATA_DB environment variable and adding a volume::

sudo docker run -d -p 8899:8899 -p 8800:8800 -v "/some_local_path/db:/db" \
                -e IM_DATA_DB=/db/inf.dat --name im ghcr.io/grycap/im

You can also specify an external MySQL server to store IM data using the IM_DATA_DB environment variable::

sudo docker run -d -p 8899:8899 -p 8800:8800 \
                -e IM_DATA_DB=mysql://username:password@server/db_name \
                --name im ghcr.io/grycap/im

Or you can also add a volume with all the IM configuration::

sudo docker run -d -p 8899:8899 -p 8800:8800 \
                -v "/some_local_path/im.cfg:/etc/im/im.cfg"
                --name im ghcr.io/grycap/im

2 Kubernetes Helm Chart

The IM service and web interface can be installed on top of Kubernetes using Helm.

How to install the IM chart:

First add the GRyCAP repo:

helm repo add grycap https://grycap.github.io/helm-charts/

Then install the IM chart (with Helm v2):

helm install --namespace=im --name=im  grycap/IM

Then install the IM chart (with Helm v3):

helm install --namespace=im --create-namespace im  grycap/IM

All the information about this chart is available at the IM chart README.

3 INSTALLATION

3.1 REQUISITES

IM is based on Python, so Python 2.7 or higher (Python 3.6 or higher recommended) runtime and standard library must be installed in the system.

If you use pip to install the IM, all the requisites will be installed. However, if you install IM from sources you should install:

• The RADL parser (https://github.com/grycap/radl), available in pip as the RADL package.
• The paramiko ssh2 protocol library for python version 1.14 or later (http://www.lag.net/paramiko/), typically available as the python-paramiko package.
• The YAML library for Python, typically available as the python-yaml or PyYAML package.
• The suds library for Python, typically available as the python-suds package.
• The Netaddr library for Python, typically available as the python-netaddr package.
• The Requests library for Python, typically available as the python-requests package.
• TOSCA parser library for Python, available as the tosca-parser package in pip.
• Ansible (http://www.ansibleworks.com/) to configure nodes in the infrastructures. In particular, Ansible 2.4+ must be installed. To ensure the functionality the following values must be set in the ansible.cfg file (usually found in /etc/ansible/):

[defaults]
transport  = smart
host_key_checking = False
nocolor = 1

become_user      = root
become_method    = sudo

[paramiko_connection]

record_host_keys=False

[ssh_connection]

# Only in systems with OpenSSH support to ControlPersist
ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=900s -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
# In systems with older versions of OpenSSH (RHEL 6, CentOS 6, SLES 10 or SLES 11)
#ssh_args = -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
pipelining = True

3.2 OPTIONAL PACKAGES

The Bottle framework (http://bottlepy.org/) is used for the REST API. It is typically available as the python-bottle system package or bottle pip package.

The CherryPy Web framework (http://www.cherrypy.org/), is needed for the REST API. It is typically available as the python-cherrypy or python-cherrypy3 system package or CherryPy pip package. In newer versions (9.0 and later) the functionality has been moved to the cheroot library (https://github.com/cherrypy/cheroot) it can be installed using pip.

Apache-libcloud (http://libcloud.apache.org/) 3.0 or later is used in the LibCloud, OpenStack and GCE connectors. It is typically available as the python-libcloud system package or apache-libcloud pip package.

Boto (http://boto.readthedocs.org) 2.29.0 or later is used as interface to Amazon EC2. It is available as package named python-boto in Debian based distributions or boto pip package. It can also be downloaded from boto GitHub repository (https://github.com/boto/boto). Download the file and copy the boto subdirectory into the IM install path.

In case of using the a MySQL DB as the backend to store IM data. The Python interface to MySQL must be installed, typically available as the package python-mysqldb or MySQL-python package. In case of using Python 3 use the PyMySQL package, available as the package python3-pymysql on debian systems or PyMySQL package in pip.

In case of using the a MongoDB as the backend to store IM data. The Python interface to MongoDB must be installed, typically available as the package python-pymongopackage in most distributions or pymongo pip package.

In case of using the SSL secured version of the REST API pyOpenSSL (https://pyopenssl.org/) must be installed. available as pyOpenSSL package in pip.

Azure python SDK (https://azure.microsoft.com/es-es/develop/python/) is used to connect with the Microsoft Azure platform. The easiest way is to install all the required packages with pip:

pip install msrest msrestazure azure-common azure-mgmt-storage \
            azure-mgmt-compute azure-mgmt-network azure-mgmt-resource \
            azure-mgmt-dns azure-identity

The VMware vSphere API Python Bindings (https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi/) are needed by the vSphere connector. It is available as the package pyvmomi at the pip repository.

3.3 INSTALLING

3.3.1 From PIP

First you need to install pip tool and some packages needed to compile some of the IM requirements. To install them in Debian and Ubuntu based distributions, do::

apt update
apt install -y gcc python3-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev python3-pip sshpass \
               default-libmysqlclient-dev

In Red Hat based distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, Oracle Linux, Fedora, etc.), do:

yum install -y epel-release
yum install -y which gcc python3-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel \
               python3-pip sshpass

Then you only have to call the install command of the pip tool with the IM package:

pip3 install IM

You can also install an specific branch of the Github repository:

pip install git+https://github.com/grycap/im.git@master

Pip will also install the, non installed, pre-requisites needed. So Ansible 2.4 or later will be installed in the system. Some of the optional packages are also installed please check if some of IM features that you need requires to install some of the packages of section OPTIONAL PACKAGES.

You must also remember to modify the ansible.cfg file setting as specified in the REQUISITES section.

3.4 START IM ON BOOT

In case that you want the IM service to be started at boot time, you must execute the next set of commands:

On Debian Systems:

chkconfig im on

Or for newer systems like ubuntu 14.04:

sysv-rc-conf im on

On RedHat Systems:

update-rc.d im start 99 2 3 4 5 . stop 05 0 1 6 .

Or you can do it manually:

ln -s /etc/init.d/im /etc/rc2.d/S99im
ln -s /etc/init.d/im /etc/rc3.d/S99im
ln -s /etc/init.d/im /etc/rc5.d/S99im
ln -s /etc/init.d/im /etc/rc1.d/K05im
ln -s /etc/init.d/im /etc/rc6.d/K05im

Adjust the installation path by setting the IMDAEMON variable at /etc/init.d/im to the path where the IM im_service.py file is installed (e.g. /usr/local/im/im_service.py), or set the name of the script file (im_service.py) if the file is in the PATH (pip puts the im_service.py file in the PATH as default).

4 CONFIGURATION

Check the parameters in $IM_PATH/etc/im.cfg or /etc/im/im.cfg. See IM Manual to get a full reference of the configuration variables.

Please pay attention to the next configuration variables, as they are the most important:

DATA_DB - must be set to the URL to access the database to store the IM data. Be careful if you have two different instances of the IM service running in the same machine!!. It can be a MySQL DB: mysql://username:password@server/db_name, SQLite: sqlite:///etc/im/inf.dat or MongoDB: mongodb://username:password@server/db_name,

4.1 SECURITY

Security is disabled by default. Please notice that someone with local network access can "sniff" the traffic and get the messages with the IM with the authorisation data with the cloud providers.

Security can be activated both in the XMLRPC and REST APIs. Setting this variables:

XMLRCP_SSL = True

or

REST_SSL = True

And then set the variables: XMLRCP_SSL_* or REST_SSL_* to your certificates paths.