Creating Lightbits Volumes for Your Workloads

Accessing the Lightbits Cluster

After the stack deployment has been completed, you will find the Lightbits instances in your EC2 console.

Navigate to the EC2 console within the same region where Lightbits was deployed, and check that you have three new instances running. Make sure that the three Lightbits instances in a state of Running with the “Status check” are showing 2/2 checks passed:

Accessing Lightbits using 'SSM'

By default, terminal access to Lightbits instances should be done via AWS Session Manager (SSM).

There is also an option to SSH to the cluster, with a client instance attached to the Lightbits cluster's VPC. Make sure to transfer the SSH-key to the client in same VPC; you will then be able to SSH with a client.

For more information, see Launching an Application/Benchmarking Client Inside the Lightbits Cluster VPC.

Click on one of the Instance IDs of the Lightbits nodes:

On the Instance summary page, click Connect:

Make sure you are on the Session Manager tab and click Connect:

Lightbits Cluster Preparation

Grant Root Access:

  1. Once you are on one of the Lightbits nodes, you can create a Lightbits volume to provision to your clients.
  2. Run sudo -i in order to grant root permissions:

System-Scope JWT

During the installation process, the system is bootstrapped with a system-scoped default project. To act as cluster-admin, you will need a JWT.

The installation process will create a JWT and should be placed at /opt/light-app/config/cluster1/system_jwt, under the system_jwt file:

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The easiest way to use the lbcli command-line from one of the Lightbits servers is to add the JWT to the end of the /etc/lbcli/lbcli.yaml file. This file is stored in any Lightbits server. You can use one of them to manage the server.

Example:

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This JWT gives admin access to the cluster. Make sure to delete this file once it is complete or secure, and do not share the file with unauthorized users.

Creating a Volume on the Lightbits Storage Server

To create a volume on the cluster, log into any of the Lightbits cluster servers and enter the lbcli create volume command.

In this guide we will cover only the basic 'lbcli' administration commands. For the full list of lbcli commands, see the Lightbits CLI documentation and the CLI section of the Lightbits Administration Guide.

Sample Command

Create a volume with compression and three replicas, and list the created volume:

  • replica-count - the number of replicas of the volume spread across the cluster nodes (three is recommended in AWS).
  • compression - true/false
  • project-name - multi-tenancy can be enabled, but for this guide we will use the 'default' project.
  • acl - Access List - this will be passed in the client 'nvme-connect' command, in order to expose the volume to the client.
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Sample Output

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List the created volumes:
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Check the cluster information and health:

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This retrieves a list of NVMe devices in the cluster. The list can be filtered to list NVMe SSDs that exist in a specific server, are managed by a specific node, or are unmanaged.

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Returns a list of nodes in the cluster, and information on each node.

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Next to read:
Provisioning Lightbits Block Volumes to Your AWS Applications

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On This Page
Creating Lightbits Volumes for Your WorkloadsAccessing the Lightbits ClusterAccessing Lightbits using 'SSM'Lightbits Cluster PreparationSystem-Scope JWTCreating a Volume on the Lightbits Storage Server