Deploying a MariaDB 10.4 Galera cluster with Clustercontrol

What is ClusterControl ?

Since years, I’m using and installing by customers a management and automation software called “ClusterControl” from Severalnines (www.severalnines.com).
With it, you can easily deploy, manage, monitor and scale your open source database servers or clusters (MariaDB, Percona, Postgres, Galera) from one GUI (Clustercontrol User Interface) on premise or even in the cloud.
Some weeks ago, Severalnines announced the version 1.7.4 with several new features. One of these was the support of MariaDB 10.4/Galera cluster 4.
In this blog, I just want to briefly show how simple it is to deploy a MariaDB Galera cluster with this software.
But first I have to upgrade to this version and this process is also easy (https://severalnines.com/docs/administration.html).

Before starting the deploiement, as a prerequisite, you have to setup passwordless SSH between all nodes, (clustercontrol and target hosts).
On the clustercontrol node, you generate the SSH key by using ssh-keygen and then copy the SSH key to all nodes by using ssh-copy-id.

Deployment

Once, logged in, the following Welcome window will appear where you can choose among other features the “Deploy” item.

The new window will ask you to define first the SSH settings as:
– root credentials
– cluster name
Secondly the cluster definition by selecting:
– between several Open Source RDBMS (MySQL Galera)
– the vendor (MariaDB)
– the Version (10.4)
Now you have to enter for each cluster member, the IP adress. Clustercontrol immediately checks if he can communicate with every targets.
Finally, press the “Deploy button”, it will trigger a job that can be monitored.

While the job is still running, you can follow the complete deployment process by pressing the “Activity button”.
This will open a window where a complete and detailled list of all actions performed are displayed until successful completion.

Once the job is over, the cluster is automatically added to the first page, providing a status overview of it.

Conclusion

As you can see, Clustercontrol can help you to deploy the latest version of the MariaDB Galera Cluster with just some clicks. The GUI is so intuitive, you just have to follow and you get it. A child’s play. In this blog, I was just talking about the installation but there are so many other features like the Backup/Restore, Monitoring, Security (SSL encryption & Audit). Severalnines offers a free 30 day trial period of ClusterControl Enterprise where you can test everything . Try it and let me know, it worth it.