VirtualBox crash after Install (one node lost) - any easy way to re-install?
So, first off, I'm a newbie to VirtualBox (and only have a 4GB local system), making it rather difficult to get through the process with VirtualBox as Vertica requires 1GB per CPU, and well.. it took one hour just to save the snapshot of my "host/install" node successfully, but, it crashed the second node. Being new to Vertica, I'm not really sure what "contents" an install places on a disk. I'd essentially have to create another virtual image...
What's the easiest way? Keep in mind, I'd LOVE to be able to do this without all three VM open and running at the same time, so I can ensure successful saving of each snapshot once the system is "repaired." Outside of other approaches I am thinking of dreaming up to do a fresh install (already spent about 20+hours to get to this point), my thought was to completely replace it with a new VM, i.e. pretending I added another node to the cluster. Then, figure out how to remove the old node from the cluster (I assume this is possible, but I have not yet attempted to find out/figure out how). Assuming I can simply create another node to add to the cluster, do I have to have all three clusters "operating (i.e. can I close down the VM of one of the other nodes to ensure I have memory and my virtual box doesn't keep causing me issues? Or, is there a way I can trick Vertica to allow less than 1GB of memory)?
If anyone has another grand idea, that would save me some time, please advise.
Thanks!
What's the easiest way? Keep in mind, I'd LOVE to be able to do this without all three VM open and running at the same time, so I can ensure successful saving of each snapshot once the system is "repaired." Outside of other approaches I am thinking of dreaming up to do a fresh install (already spent about 20+hours to get to this point), my thought was to completely replace it with a new VM, i.e. pretending I added another node to the cluster. Then, figure out how to remove the old node from the cluster (I assume this is possible, but I have not yet attempted to find out/figure out how). Assuming I can simply create another node to add to the cluster, do I have to have all three clusters "operating (i.e. can I close down the VM of one of the other nodes to ensure I have memory and my virtual box doesn't keep causing me issues? Or, is there a way I can trick Vertica to allow less than 1GB of memory)?
If anyone has another grand idea, that would save me some time, please advise.
Thanks!
0
Comments
Thanks for posting! I'm a little confused, though -- what is this about multiple nodes?
Vertica will run just fine as a single-node system. There's typically no reason to run multiple nodes as VM's on the same physical hardware; most likely you'll just see a bunch of instability and disk IO contention. Each Vertica node should be on a separate physical machine; so if you have one machine, you should run one node.
Vertica actually requires 2gb RAM per core. You are correct that the actual hard cutoff (below which it will outright refuse to run) is around 1gb. But if you only have 1gb RAM, you will find that the installer issues a warning and that many queries will refuse to run due to insufficient memory. We recommend 4gb RAM per core for production deployments.
Regarding what's installed by the installer, it actually does a bunch of things. In addition to installing files, it generates an empty local database (which contains various information about the machine that it's running on), and it checks a variety of system configuration parameters and tunes them as needed. We've had a number of people try to do that work on their own. I'm not aware of any who have succeeded and been happy with the result :-) So I really would encourage you to stick with something that's simple, quick to install, and that fits comfortably within your machine's system resources.
Given your system's resources, I'd recommend that you install a VM, allocate it 2gb RAM, and install Vertica on it. Nothing more complicated than that. The "install Vertica on it" step should only take a few minutes in this case.
Incidentally, do you need to run VirtualBox specifically? We actually provide pre-built VM images on our Downloads page. None of them are specifically built for VirtualBox, but one of them will work with VMware Workstation. The same one will work with VMware Player, which is a free download.
Adam
You can keep trying, but I would expect you to encounter lots more problems like or worse than what you've seen so far. Ordinarily, the installation is actually pretty fast; the fact that you're finding it to be so slow implies to me that your system is hugely overloaded.
If you're able, I think your life would get dramatically easier if you upgraded the RAM in your machine. Even an extra 4gb, which is pretty cheap these days if your computer has room for an upgrade card, would I think make this whole process work a lot more smoothly for you. Even then you would probably only want to run a two-node system, since VirtualBox itself has some memory overhead, probably you're already running a few processes on your computer that use some RAM, etc.
An alternative would be to try running on Amazon -- we do provide prepackaged EC2 images; you can spin up a cluster there and experiment all you want.
I just wasn't sure if this would function, if the database was never created,but only the install_vertica script was run. Anyhow, I'll play around. Appreciate your advice so far, I may look into other options, but I'll spend one more evening being stubborn on this anyhow