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Merak

A Large-scale Cloud Emulator provides ability to

• emulate data center physical topologies and network devices including hosts, switches, and routers.
• emulate a large volume of compute nodes (more than 100K) with limited physical hardware resources.
• conduct the performance test for a target project's (e.g., Alcor) control plane with a large-size of VPC having more than 1M VMs.
• automatically create and conduct different performance test scenarios and collect results.

Platforms

There are many different hardware resource management platform in the field, currently we choose two platforms to investigate and create our prototype:

• Kubernetes cluster with Meshnet CNI
• Distrinet with LXD containers

Architecture

The following diagram illustrate the high-level architecture of Merak on a kubernetes cluster using Meshnet CNI and the basic workflow to emulate Alcor's control plane for creating VMs in the emulated compute nodes.

Components

• Scenario Manager: create the required topology and test scenarios.
• K8S-Topo: deploy pods with the given topology.
• Merak Network: create network infrastructure resources, e.g., vpcs, subnets, and security groups.
• Merak Compute: register compute nodes informantion, create VMs and collect test results from merak agents.
• Merak Agent: create virtual network devices (bridges, tap devices and veth pairs) and network namespace for VMs, collect test results and send the results back to merak compute.

Scalability

In order to provide more virtual and emulated resources with limited hardware resources, three possible solutions are investigated and developed in this project:

• Docker-in-Docker
• Kubernetes-in-Kubernetes (KinK)
• Kubernetes cluster in virtual machines

For more detail design and information, please refer to the docs folder in this repository.

Kind: Simple Deployment and E2E Test

This test will bring up Merak and Alcor in a single master node Kind Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

• Minimum Machine Requirements (Our tests were ran on AWS t2.2xlarge ec2 instances)

  • 16GB RAM
  • 8 Core CPU

• Update

  sudo apt-get update

• Make

  sudo apt-get install make

• Helm

  curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

• Linkerd CLI

  curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install | sh
  export PATH=$PATH:/home/ubuntu/.linkerd2/bin

• Kind

  curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.17.0/kind-linux-amd64 && chmod +x ./kind && sudo mv ./kind /usr/local/bin/kind

• Kubectl

  curl -LO https://dl.k8s.io/release/v1.26.0/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl && sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

• Docker

  sudo apt-get install docker.io

  • Add current user to docker group (for running docker without sudo)

    sudo groupadd docker
    sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker
    newgrp docker

Step 1: Deploy

You can deploy Merak and Alcor in Kind with the command below.

git clone https://github.com/futurewei-cloud/merak.git
cd merak
make kind-alcor

Please wait for all pods to be in running state as shown in the picture below before proceeding to the next step. This should take approximately 5 minutes.

Step 2: Run The Test

You can use the prebuilt test tool as shown below.

./tools/teste2e/bin/teste2e

This will create 5 hosts with 10 VM each. Once everything is created, you can test network connnectivity as shown below.

1. Run kubectl get pods -A to see all vhost pods.

2. Merak uses network namespaces to emulate VMs, run kubectl exec -it -n <namespace of the pod> vhost-0 ip netns exec v000 ip a to get the IP address of the emulated VM v000 inside of the emulated host vhost-0.

3. Ping the VM v000 on vhost-0 from a different VM on vhost-1 with the following command kubectl exec -it -n <namespace of the pod> vhost-1 ip netns exec v000 ping (IP address from step 2)

Clean-up:

Run the command below to clean up the Kind environment.

kind delete cluster

Getting Started With Development

To build this project, please make sure the following things are installed:

• Go: https://go.dev/doc/install
• Protobuf: https://grpc.io/docs/protoc-installation/
• Go plugins for gRPC: https://grpc.io/docs/languages/go/quickstart/
• Docker: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Then, the project can be built with:

make

How to Deploy a Development Cluster

Prerequisites

Before deploying Merak with Alcor, you will need the following.

• A Kubernetes cluster with flannel installed
• Helm
  • curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash
• Needed for Alcor
  • Linkerd installed on the cluster
  • openvswitch-switch installed on every node (apt install openvswitch-switch)

NOTE: Please wait for all LinkerD pods and containers to be fully running before moving on to the steps below.

Deployment

Once your cluster is ready, you can deploy the latest small scale development (one replica for every service) build of Merak and Alcor with the command below.

kubectl kustomize https://github.com/futurewei-cloud/merak/deployments/kubernetes/alcor --enable-helm | kubectl apply -f -

A successful deployment should take roughly 5 minutes for all pods to come to running state. The deployed components are as follows:

• Merak Microservices and their Redis instances
  • Merak Scenario Manager
  • Merak Topology
  • Merak Network
  • Merak Compute
• Meshnet CNI
• Temporal
• Prometheus
• Alcor Microservices and their Ignite instances
  • Port Manager
  • Network Config Manager
  • API Manager
  • EIP Manager
  • Dataplane Manager
  • IP Manager
  • Mac Manager
  • Node Manager
  • Quota Manager
  • Route Manager
  • Security Group Manager
  • Subnet Manager
  • VPC Manager
• LinkerD

The deployment settings such as container image and replicas can be changed by editing the kustomize file under deployments/kubernetes/alcor/kustomization.yaml and redeploying with

kubectl kustomize deployments/kubernetes/alcor --enable-helm | kubectl apply -f -