Step 1 - Meta Node Installation

This is archived documentation for InfluxData product versions that are no longer maintained. For newer documentation, see the latest InfluxData documentation.

InfluxEnterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management UI for working with clusters. The Production Installation process is designed for users looking to deploy InfluxEnterprise in a production environment. The following steps will get you up and running with the first essential component of your InfluxEnterprise cluster: the meta nodes.

If you wish to evaluate InfluxEnterprise in a non-production environment, feel free to follow the instructions outlined in the QuickStart Installation section. Please note that if you install InfluxEnterprise with the QuickStart Installation process you will need to reinstall InfluxEnterprise with the Production Installation process before using the product in a production environment.


Meta Node Setup Description and Requirements

The Production Installation process sets up three meta nodes and each meta node runs on its own server. You must have a minimum of three meta nodes in a cluster. InfluxEnterprise clusters require at least three meta nodes and an odd number of meta nodes for high availability and redundancy. We do not recommend having more than three meta nodes unless your servers are unreliable. Note that there is no requirement for each meta node to run on its own server.

See the Clustering Guide for more on cluster architecture.

Other Requirements

License Key or File

InfluxEnterprise requires a license key OR a license file to run. Your license key is available at InfluxPortal. Contact support at the email we provided at signup to receive a license file. License files are required only if the nodes in your cluster cannot reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443.

Ports

Meta nodes communicate over ports 8088, 8089, and 8091.

For licensing purposes, meta nodes must also be able to reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443. If the meta nodes cannot reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443, you’ll need to set the license-path setting instead of the license-key setting in the meta node configuration file.


Meta Node Setup

Step 1: Modify the /etc/hosts File

Add your servers’ hostnames and IP addresses to each cluster server’s /etc/hosts file (the hostnames are representative):

<Meta_1_IP> enterprise-meta-01
<Meta_2_IP> enterprise-meta-02
<Meta_3_IP> enterprise-meta-03

Verification steps:

Before proceeding with the installation, verify on each server that the other servers are resolvable. Here is an example set of shell commands using ping:

ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-01
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-02
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-03

If there are any connectivity issues resolve them before proceeding with the installation. A healthy cluster requires that every meta node can communicate with every other meta node.

Step 2: Set up, Configure, and Start the Meta Services

Perform the following steps on each meta server.

I. Download and Install the Meta Service

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta_1.1.5-c1.1.5_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.1.5-c1.1.5_amd64.deb

RedHat & CentOS (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta-1.1.5_c1.1.5.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-meta-1.1.5_c1.1.5.x86_64.rpm

II. Edit the Configuration File

In /etc/influxdb/influxdb-meta.conf, set:

  • hostname to the full hostname of the meta node
  • registration-enabled in the [enterprise] section to true
  • registration-server-url in the [enterprise] section to the full URL of the server that will run the InfluxEnterprise web console. You must fully specify the protocol, IP or hostname, and port. Entering the IP or hostname alone will lead to errors.
  • license-key in the [enterprise] section to the license key you received on InfluxPortal OR license-path in the [enterprise] section to the local path to the JSON license file you received from InfluxData. The license-key and license-path settings are mutually exclusive and one must remain set to the empty string.

    # Hostname advertised by this host for remote addresses.  This must be resolvable by all
    # other nodes in the cluster
    hostname="<enterprise-meta-0x>"
    
    [enterprise]
    # Must be set to true to use the Enterprise Web UI
    registration-enabled = true
    
    # Must include the protocol (http://)
    registration-server-url = "http://<web-console-server-IP>:3000"
    
    # license-key and license-path are mutually exclusive, use only one and leave the other blank
    license-key = "<your_license_key>" # Mutually exclusive with license-path
    
    # license-key and license-path are mutually exclusive, use only one and leave the other blank
    license-path = "/path/to/readable/JSON.license.file" # Mutually exclusive with license-key

III. Start the Meta Service

On sysvinit systems, enter:

service influxdb-meta start

On systemd systems, enter:

sudo systemctl start influxdb-meta

Verification steps:

Check to see that the process is running by entering:

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep influxdb-meta

You should see output similar to:

influxdb  3207  0.8  4.4 483000 22168 ?        Ssl  17:05   0:08 /usr/bin/influxd-meta -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb-meta.conf


Note: It is possible to start the cluster with a single meta node but you must pass the -single-server flag when starting the single meta node. Please note that a cluster with only one meta node is not recommended for production environments.

Step 3: Join the Meta Nodes to the Cluster

From one and only one meta node, join all meta nodes including itself. In our example, from enterprise-meta-01, run:

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-01:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-02:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-03:8091

Note: Please make sure that you specify the hostname and port of the meta node during the join process. Please do not specify localhost as this can cause cluster connection issues.

The expected output is:

Added meta node x at enterprise-meta-0x:8091

Verification steps:

Issue the following command on any meta node:

influxd-ctl show

The expected output is:

Meta Nodes
==========
TCP Address
enterprise-meta-01:8091
enterprise-meta-02:8091
enterprise-meta-03:8091

Note that your cluster must have at least three meta nodes. If you do not see your meta nodes in the output, please retry adding them to the cluster.

Once your meta nodes are part of your cluster move on to the next steps to set up your data nodes. Please do not continue to the next steps if your meta nodes are not part of the cluster.