armbiant/vhpc-toolkit

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit - A toolkit to help configure and manage virtual high performance computing (HPC) clusters by leveraging vSphere APIs

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit (vHPC Toolkit)

Overview

Due to their extreme demand on performance, HPC workloads often have much more intensive resource requirements than those workloads found in the typical enterprise. For example, HPC commonly leverages hardware accelerators, such as GPU and FPGA for compute as well as RDMA interconnects, which require special vSphere configurations.

This toolkit is intended to facilitate managing the lifecycle of these special configurations by leveraging vSphere APIs. It also includes features that help vSphere administrators perform some common vSphere tasks that are related to creating such high-performing environments, such as VM cloning, setting Latency Sensitivity, and sizing vCPUs, memory, etc.

Try It Out

Prerequisites

OS for using this toolkit: Linux or Mac
vSphere >=6.5
Python >=3.7

Install

Package dependencies will be isolated in a Python virtual environment by virtualenv. This allows us to have different versions of dependencies.

To install virtualenv if you don't have one, for example,

• For Mac: pip install --upgrade virtualenv
• For Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python3-pip; sudo pip3 install virtualenv

Setup this toolkit with an virtual env:

git clone https://github.com/vmware/vhpc-toolkit.git
cd vhpc-toolkit
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install vhpc_toolkit

If you want to actively modify the toolkit, it is recommended to install it in "develop" mode

pip install -e <folder_with_setup.py>
# If setup.py is in current folder
pip install -e .

Secure Setup via Vault

This toolkit leverages vSphere APIs to manage vSphere objects (such as VMs, distributed virtual switches). So it needs connection to vCenter. In order to enable the possibility of automation (without prompting password every operation), as one option, you could put your vCenter information in vCenter.conf under vhpc_toolkit/config or ~/vhpc_toolkit, such as

# vCenter configuration 
server: 192.168.0.1 
username: mySecretUsername
password: mySecretPassword

However, it's NOT secure to explicitly store your sensitive information in a plain text file. So we enable Vault integration. With Vault, the setup procedure is like this:

1. Follow Vault instructions to install Vault and setup a Vault server if you don't have one

2. Connect to Vault server by export VAULT_ADDR=xx and export VAULT_TOKEN=xx environment variables

3. Store your vCenter secrets as key value pairs under a secret path into the Vault server, e.g.

vault kv put secret/vCenter vcenter-hostname=192.168.0.1 vcenter-username=mySecretUsername vcenter-password=mySecretPassword

4. Finally, you can directly put your keys in vCenter.conf file as:

# vCenter configuration 
vault: yes
vault_secret_path: vCenter
server: vcenter-hostname
username: vcenter-username
password: vcenter-password

For more advanced features of Vault, such as managing token leases, dynamic secrets and Web UI, please refer to Vault.

Verification

After proper installation and setup, you should be able to execute ./vhpc_toolkit --help under vhpc_toolkit/bin folder to view all available operations. Use ./vhpc_toolkit view as a quick test.

Documentation

Please refer to our Documentation Site

Additional functions

Please share your ideas

Contributing

The vhpc-toolkit project team welcomes contributions from the community. Before you start working with vhpc-toolkit, please read our Developer Certificate of Origin. All contributions to this repository must be signed as described on that page. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. For more detailed information, refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

This toolkit is available under the Apache 2 license.