Provision a Deis Cluster on bare-metal hardware

Deis clusters can be provisioned anywhere CoreOS can, including on your own hardware. To get CoreOS running on raw hardware, you can boot with PXE or iPXE - this will boot a CoreOS machine running entirely from RAM. Then, you can install CoreOS to disk.

Generate SSH key

To avoid problems deploying/launching apps later on it is necessary to install CoreOS to disk with a SSH key without a passphrase. The following command will generate a new keypair named "deis".

$ ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/deis -N '' -C deis

Customize user-data

Discovery URL

Edit user-data and add a new discovery URL. You can get a new one by sending a request to http://discovery.etcd.io/new.

SSH Key

Add the public key part for the SSH key generated in the first step to the user-data file:

ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-rsa AAAAB3... deis

Update $private_ipv4

CoreOS on bare metal doesn't detect the $private_ipv4 reliably. Replace all occurences in the user-data with the (private) IP address of the node.

Add environment

Since CoreOS doesn't detect private and public IP adresses the /etc/environmnet file doesn't get written on boot. Add it to the write_files section of user-data

  - path: /etc/environment
    permissions: 0644
    content: |
      COREOS_PUBLIC_IPV4=<your public ip>
      COREOS_PRIVATE_IPV4=<your private ip>

Install CoreOS to disk

Assuming you have booted your bare metal server into CoreOS you can perform now perform the installation to disk.

Provide the config file to the installer

Save the user-data to your bare metal machine. The example assumes you transferred the config to /tmp/config

Start the installation

coreos-install -C alpha -c /tmp/config -d /dev/sda

This will install the current CoreOS release to disk. If you want to install the recommended CoreOS version check the Deis changelog and specify that version by appending the -V parameter to the install command, e.g. -V 402.2.0.

After the installation has finished reboot your server. Once your machine is back up you should be able to log in as the core user using the deis ssh key.

Initialize the cluster

Once your server(s) are all provisioned you can proceed to install Deis. Use the hostname of one of your machines in the next step.

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/deis
$ export FLEETCTL_TUNNEL=your.server.name.here
$ cd ../.. && make run

Use Deis!

After that, register with Deis!

$ deis register http://deis.example.org
username: deis
password:
password (confirm):
email: info@opdemand.com

Considerations when deploying Deis:

• Use machines with ample disk space and RAM (we use large instances on EC2, for comparison)
• Choose an appropriate cluster size

Known problems

Hostname is localhost

If your hostname after installation to disk is localhost set the hostname in user-data before installation:

hostname: your-hostname

The hostname must not be the fully qualified domain name!

Slow name resolution

Certain DNS servers and firewalls have problems with glibc sending out requests for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in parallel. The solution is to set the option single-request in /etc/resolv.conf. This can best be accomplished in the user-data when installing CoreOS to disk. Add the following block to the write_files section:

  - path: /etc/resolv.conf
    permissions: 0644
    content: |
      nameserver 8.8.8.8
      nameserver 8.8.4.4
      domain your.domain.name
      options single-request