FAQ

Categories

Conceptual

CQ1. What are the differences between a Virtual Application (VApp) and a Virtual Application Submitter (VAppS)?

CQ2. The documentation refers to Virtual Application (VApp) and a Virtual Application Submitter (VAppS), but on CBTOOL's CLI, messages and commands keep referring to Application Instance (AI) and Application Instance Deployment Request Submitter (AIDRS).

CQ3. I understand that there are in fact two ways to alter an attribute on an Object: (a) by changing my private cloud configuration file or (b) by issuing cldalter, rolealter, typealter and patternalter commands on the CLI. That is a tiny bit confusing. Are there any guidelines on when to use (a) or (b)?

CQ4. I want to deploy a single VM or single Virtual Application with different parameters (i.e., I don't want to alter the parameters for all subsequent VMs or VApps, but for the one). How can I do that?

CQ5. In the configuration file, each cloud has two attributes relating to SSH keys (e.g., OSK_KEY_NAME and OSK_SSH_KEY_NAME for OpenStack). This seems confusing. What exactly are these?

Setup

SQ1. What do I need in order to start using CBTOOL?

SQ2. What is my "private" cloud configuration file? Where is it located?

SQ3. I have an external Redis/MongoDB node (or set of nodes) that I would like to use as Object Store/Metric Store for CBTOOL. Which configurations do I need to change to "point" CBTOOL to these?

SQ4. Do you have any sizing guidelines for the CBTOOL orchestrator node?

SQ5. Can I run multiple instances of CBTOOL on the same orchestrator node?

SQ6. I want to run the CBTOOL orchestrator node outside the cloud/I want to run a single large CBTOOL orchestrator node that benchmarks multiple clouds. How should I configure CBTOOL?

SQ7. Are there any tools available to help with the building of images containing all the requirements for different Virtual Application types

SQ8. Is it possible to programmatically/automatically create a private cloud configuration file?

SQ9. Can I execute the CBTOOL Orchestrator as a Docker container?

Use

UQ1. What is the difference between --soft_reset and --hard_reset?

UQ2. I see that CBTOOL has a GUI. Where can I learn more?

UQ3. How can I quickly check if performance data is being properly generated by CBTOOL?

UQ4. What is the experiment identifier?

UQ5. How can I extract/save the performance data generated by CBTOOL?

UQ6. Do you have any utilities for automatic data plot generation?

UQ7. What is the difference between the attributes NETNAME, RUN_NETNAME and PROV_NETNAME?

UQ8. Does CBTOOL support cloud-init?

UQ9. How can I quickly check if CBTOOL is properly configured to deploy VMs in my cloud`?

UQ10. I just want the instantiate VMs, but don't want them to run any application. I just want to see the cloud's provisioning performance with "zero application load". Can I do that with CBTOOL?

UQ11. How can I quickly check the number of VMs failed/deployed?

UQ12. I have a VM image that was configured to run a certain application with a username different than the username that is indicated on the VM role template. Is there a way for me to specify a per-Virtual Application-type login for each VM "role"?

UQ13. Can I extract collected performance data directly from the Metric Store?

UQ14. How can I experiment with VM image capture on a cloud?

UQ15. I know that CBTOOL keeps polling the cloud in order to determine when VMs become "active" (i.e., the instance started the booting process). How can I control the polling frequency?

UQ16. How can I control the operation (e.g., vmattach) parallelism in CBTOOL?

UQ17. How can I debug vmattach errors in the post-instance start phase?

UQ18. How can I debug aiattach errors in the post-instance start phase?

UQ19. The Virtual Application Instance deploys properly, but no application performance metrics samples are generated. How can I debug "application load" (i.e., load manager) errors in the post-Application Instance start phase?

UQ20. What are the attributes IMAGE_PREFIX and IMAGE_SUFFIX?

UQ21. Can CBTOOL execute generic actions before/during/after deploying VMs or VApps ?

UQ22. How can I experiment with "fault injection" on a cloud?

UQ23. How can I access the GUI on a remote Orchestrator Node?

UQ24. How can I debug the (starting of the process which implements) the GUI?

UQ25. How can I SSH into a newly created Virtual Machine?

Development

DQ1. I want to add a new Cloud Adapter for CBTOOL, and I verified that this new Cloud Model is fully supported by LibCloud (https://libcloud.apache.org/). How should I proceed?

DQ2. I want to add a new Cloud Adapter for CBTOOL, and I cannot use LibCloud (https://libcloud.apache.org/). How should I proceed?

DQ3. I want to add a new Workload for CBTOOL. How should I proceed?

DQ4. I am creating a new Virtual Application (VApp) type for CBTOOL. How can I debug my application-specific "setup" configuration scripts?

DQ5. I have implemented a new core feature, Cloud Adapter or Virtual Application (VApp) for CBTOOL. How can I run a regression test?

Workloads

WQ1. I see that CBTOOL can run a variety of different benchmarks/workloads. Will CBTOOL install these applications (e.g., Hadoop, MySQL, DB2, WebSphere) on the VMs automatically for me?

WQ2. I know that the Virtual Application Submitters can continuously deploy Virtual Applications with a certain arrival rate. What I want is to deploy a bunch of Virtual Applications at once (i.e., "bulk arrival"). Can I do that with CBTOOL?

WQ3. Can I use CBTOOL to just deploy a Virtual Application, without generating load after it is started?

WQ4. I have a Virtual Application Submitter (VAppS) (Application Instance Deployment Request Submitter (AIDRS)) and just want to have it immediately stopping the deployment of new Virtual Application instances, while still removing the ones already created, once their lifetime expires. How can I do it?

WQ5. Can I set SLA targets for Virtual Application provisioning time and performance?

WQ6. Can I "scale-out" (i.e., increase the number of VMs) an already deployed Virtual Application instance?

WQ7. Can I attach data volumes to individual VM instances while deploying Virtual Applications?

WQ8. Can I deploy a VM to act as load balancer between two application tiers in a given Virtual Application instance?

WQ9. What are the multiple app columns that I see on the generated csv files (VM_runtime_app_<experiment id>.csv) or on the Web GUI (Application Performance tab on Dashboard?

WQ10. Can I deploy multiple "load generator" VMs into a single Virtual Application?

WQ11. Can I temporarily stop/suspend load generation on a a single Virtual Application?

WQ12. Which "tunable" parameters are available for given Virtual Application type? How can I alter these?

Cloud-Specific

OpenStack

CSOSKQ1. Can CBTOOL's OpenStack cloud adapter be used to instantiate VMs on RackSpace?

CSOSKQ2. Can I use CBTOOL with OpenStack's Nova "Fake Driver"?

CSOKQ3. When using CBTOOL with the OpenStack Cloud Adapter, can I instruct it to create each new VM or Virtual Application on its own tenant/network/subnet/router?

CSOKQ4. Can I instruct CBTOOL to create instances which will "boot from (Cinder) volume"?

CSOKQ5. I am running CBTOOL against an OpenStack cloud that does not have Cinder and/or Neutron Endpoint. How can I tell CBTOOL to not try to contact these Endpoint URLs?

CSOKQ6. Do you support Keystone V3?

CSOKQ7. Why there are two different cloud adapters for Openstack in cbtool?

Docker/Swarm (Parallel Docker Manager - PDM)

CSPDMQ1. My Docker/Swarm cluster is configured in such a way that each newly created Docker instance gets an IP address that is directly reachable by nodes outside the cluster. I have no need to make the instance reachable through a port (by default, port 22 on the instance) exposed on the host. How can I tell CBTOOL to stop exposing the ports?

CSPDMQ2. How can I expose additional ports from the instance through the host?

CSPDMQ3. How can I expose additional, custom devices from the host to each Docker instance (such as GPUs)?

CSPDMQ4. I see that, by default, images are being pulled directly from the ibmcb account on Docker Hub, and they are all Ubuntu-based. How can I change this?

NoOp

CSNOPQ1. Can I use CBTOOL to deploy and run Virtual Applications on bare-metal nodes, or even pre-deployed, already running VMs?

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