Configuring the Network
This group of steps involve configuring the network. These steps differ depending on your installation scenario. A single node installation requires little network configuration, since the single instance of the Vertica server does not need to communication with other nodes in a cluster. For cluster and cloud install scenarios, you must make several decisions regarding your configuration.
Vertica supports server configuration with multiple network interfaces. For example, you might want to use one as a private network interface for internal communication among cluster hosts (the ones supplied via the --hosts
option to install_vertica
) and a separate one for client connections.
Important: Vertica performs best when all nodes are on the same subnet and have the same broadcast address for one or more interfaces. A cluster that has nodes on more than one subnet can experience lower performance due to the network latency associated with a multi-subnet system at high network utilization levels.
Important Notes
- Network configuration is exactly the same for single nodes as for multi-node clusters, with one special exception. If you install Vertica on a single host machine that is to remain a permanent single-node configuration (such as for development or Proof of Concept), you can install Vertica using
localhost
or the loopback IP (typically 127.0.0.1) as the value for--hosts
. Do not use the hostnamelocalhost
in a node definition if you are likely to add nodes to the configuration later. - If you are using a host with multiple network interfaces, configure Vertica to use the address which is assigned to the NIC that is connected to the other cluster hosts.
- Use a dedicated gigabit switch. If you do not performance could be severely affected.
- Do not use DHCP dynamically-assigned IP addresses for the private network. Use only static addresses or permanently-leased DHCP addresses.
Optionally Run Spread on Separate Control Network
If your query workloads are network intensive, you can use the --control-network
parameter with the install_vertica
script (see Installing Vertica with the Installation Script) to allow spread communications to be configured on a subnet that is different from other Vertica data communications.
The --control-network
parameter accepts either the default
value or a broadcast network IP address (for example, 192.168.10.255
).
Configure SSH
- Verify that root can use Secure Shell (SSH) to log in (ssh) to all hosts that are included in the cluster. SSH (SSH client) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for running commands on a remote machine.
- If you do not already have SSH installed on all hosts, log in as root on each host and install it before installing Vertica. You can download a free version of the SSH connectivity tools from OpenSSH.
- Make sure that
/dev/pts
is mounted. Installing Vertica on a host that is missing the mount point/dev/pts
could result in the following error when you create a database:
TIMEOUT ERROR: Could not login with SSH. Here is what SSH said:Last login: Sat Dec 15 18:05:35 2007 from v_vmart_node0001
Allow Passwordless SSH Access for the Dbadmin User
The dbadmin user must be authorized for passwordless ssh. In typical installs, you won't need to change anything; however, if you set up your system to disallow passwordless login, you'll need to enable it for the dbadmin user. See Enable Secure Shell (SSH) Logins.