Step 1 - Installing InfluxDB Enterprise clusters

InfluxDB Enterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management UI for working with clusters. The QuickStart Installation process will get you up and running with your InfluxDB Enterprise cluster.

The QuickStart Installation process is not designed for use in a production environment. Follow the instructions outlined in the Production Installation section if you wish to use InfluxDB Enterprise in a production environment. Please note that if you install InfluxDB Enterprise with the QuickStart Installation process you will need to reinstall InfluxDB Enterprise with the Production Installation process before using the product in a production environment.

Setup Description and Requirements

Setup Description

The QuickStart Installation process sets up an InfluxDB Enterprise cluster on three servers. Each server is a meta node and a data node, that is, each server runs both the meta service and the data service.

Requirements

License key or file

InfluxDB Enterprise 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.

Networking

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

For licensing purposes, meta nodes and data nodes must also be able to reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443. If the 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 and data node configuration files.

Load balancer

InfluxDB Enterprise does not function as a load balancer. You will need to configure your own load balancer to send client traffic to the data nodes on port 8086 (the default port for the HTTP API).

Step 1: Modify the /etc/hosts file in each of your servers

Add your three servers’ hostnames and IP addresses to each of your server’s /etc/hosts file.

The hostnames below are representative:

<Server_1_IP_Address> quickstart-cluster-01
<Server_2_IP_Address> quickstart-cluster-02
<Server_3_IP_Address> quickstart-cluster-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 and the output for quickstart-cluster-01:

    ping -qc 1 quickstart-cluster-01
    ping -qc 1 quickstart-cluster-02
    ping -qc 1 quickstart-cluster-03

    > ping -qc 1 quickstart-cluster-01
    PING quickstart-cluster-01 (Server_1_IP_Address) 56(84) bytes of data.

    --- quickstart-cluster-01 ping statistics ---
    1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.064/0.064/0.064/0.000 ms

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

Step 2: Set up the meta nodes

Perform the following steps on all three servers.

I. Download and install the meta service

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta_1.3.8-c1.3.8_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.3.8-c1.3.8_amd64.deb

RedHat & CentOS (64-bit)]

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta-1.3.8_c1.3.8.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-meta-1.3.8_c1.3.8.x86_64.rpm

II. Edit the meta service configuration file

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

• Uncomment and set hostname to the full hostname of the meta node
• Set 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.

# Hostname advertised by this host for remote addresses.  This must be resolvable by all
# other nodes in the cluster
hostname="<quickstart-cluster-0x>"

[enterprise]
  # 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

Note: The hostname in the configuration file must match the hostname in your server’s /etc/hosts file.

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

Step 3: Set up the data nodes

Perform the following steps on all three servers.

I. Download and install the data service

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-data_1.3.8-c1.3.8_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-data_1.3.8-c1.3.8_amd64.deb

RedHat & CentOS (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-data-1.3.8_c1.3.8.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-data-1.3.8_c1.3.8.x86_64.rpm

II. Edit the data service configuration file

First, in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf, uncomment:

• hostname at the top of the file and set it to the full hostname of the data node
• auth-enabled in the [http] section and set it to true
• shared-secret in the [http] section and set it to a long pass phrase that will be used to sign tokens for intra-cluster communication. This value needs to be consistent across all data nodes.

Note: When you enable authentication, InfluxDB only executes HTTP requests that are sent with valid credentials. See the authentication section for more information.

Second, in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf, set:

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.

# Change this option to true to disable reporting.
# reporting-disabled = false
# bind-address = ":8088"
hostname="<quickstart-cluster-0x>"

[enterprise]
  # 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

  # The path to a valid license file.  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

[meta]
  # Where the cluster metadata is stored
  dir = "/var/lib/influxdb/meta" # data nodes do require a local meta directory

[...]

[http]
  # Determines whether HTTP endpoint is enabled.
  # enabled = true

  # The bind address used by the HTTP service.
  # bind-address = ":8086"

  # Determines whether HTTP authentication is enabled.
  auth-enabled = true # Recommended, but not required

[...]

  # The JWT auth shared secret to validate requests using JSON web tokens.
  shared-secret = "long pass phrase used for signing tokens"

Note: The hostname in the configuration file must match the hostname in your server’s /etc/hosts file.

III. Start the data service

On sysvinit systems, enter:

service influxdb start

On systemd systems, enter:

sudo systemctl start influxdb

Verification steps:

Check to see that the process is running by entering:

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep influxdb

You should see output similar to:

influxdb  2706  0.2  7.0 571008 35376 ?        Sl   15:37   0:16 /usr/bin/influxd -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

If you do not see the expected output, the process is either not launching or is exiting prematurely. Check the logs for error messages and verify the previous setup steps are complete.

Step 4: Join the nodes to the cluster

I. Join the first Server to the Cluster

On the first server (quickstart-cluster-01), join its meta node and data node to the cluster by entering:

influxd-ctl join

The expected output is:

Joining meta node at localhost:8091
Searching for meta node on quickstart-cluster-01:8091...
Searching for data node on quickstart-cluster-01:8088...

Successfully created cluster

  * Added meta node 1 at quickstart-cluster-01:8091
  * Added data node 2 at quickstart-cluster-01:8088

  To join additional nodes to this cluster, run the following command:

  influxd-ctl join quickstart-cluster-01:8091

Note: influxd-ctl takes the flag -v as an option to print verbose information about the join. The flag must be right after the influxd-ctl join command: influxd-ctl join -v quickstart-cluster-01:8091

To confirm that the node was successfully joined, run influxd-ctl show and verify that the node’s hostname shows in the output.

II. Join the second server to the cluster

On the second server (quickstart-cluster-02), join its meta node and data node to the cluster by entering:

influxd-ctl join quickstart-cluster-01:8091

The expected output is:

Joining meta node at quickstart-cluster-01:8091
Searching for meta node on quickstart-cluster-02:8091...
Searching for data node on quickstart-cluster-02:8088...

Successfully joined cluster

  * Added meta node 3 at quickstart-cluster-02:8091
  * Added data node 4 at quickstart-cluster-02:8088

III. Join the third server to the cluster

On the third server (quickstart-cluster-03), join its meta node and data node to the cluster by entering:

influxd-ctl join quickstart-cluster-01:8091

The expected output is:

Joining meta node at quickstart-cluster-01:8091
Searching for meta node on quickstart-cluster-03:8091...
Searching for data node on quickstart-cluster-03:8088...

Successfully joined cluster

  * Added meta node 5 at quickstart-cluster-03:8091
  * Added data node 6 at quickstart-cluster-03:8088

IV. Verify your cluster

On any server, enter:

influxd-ctl show

The expected output is:

Data Nodes
==========
ID   TCP Address                  Version
2    quickstart-cluster-01:8088   1.3.8-c1.3.8
4    quickstart-cluster-02:8088   1.3.8-c1.3.8
6    quickstart-cluster-03:8088   1.3.8-c1.3.8

Meta Nodes
==========
TCP Address                  Version
quickstart-cluster-01:8091   1.3.8-c1.3.8
quickstart-cluster-02:8091   1.3.8-c1.3.8
quickstart-cluster-03:8091   1.3.8-c1.3.8

Your cluster should have three data nodes and three meta nodes. If you do not see your meta or data nodes in the output, please retry adding them to the cluster.

Once all of your nodes are joined to the cluster, move on to the next step in the QuickStart Installation to set up Chronograf.