Kenneth Hui

Trying Out Apache Mesos

 

Life-Cereal-Box

This post is targeted specifically at readers who are new to Apache Mesos.

I’ve been writing about Apache Mesos and it’s importance as an operating system kernel for the next generation data center. You can read those posts here:

Part 1: True OS For The SDDC

Part 2: Digging Deeper Into Mesos

Part 3: Dealing with Persistent Storage And Fault Tolerance

Part 4: Resource Allocation

Part 5: Open Source Done Right

This will be a shorter blog post than usual for me but for good reasons.  I had originally planned a much longer post detailing how someone can get started with building Mesos, both on a single node and on multiple nodes.  However, I quickly realized that there were already a number of blogs posts ou there by some very smart people.  So rather than reinventing the wheel, I am going to link to some of these freely available resources.

The folks over at Mesosphere, who are working on creating a commercialized product based on Mesos, have a short online course that is worth walking through.  Their web site also has links to instructions for installing Mesos on physical servers, personal laptop or PC, and a number of public IaaS cloud platforms.

The clearest instructions I’ve found so far for setting up a test Mesos environment comes from a series of blog posts by Frank Hinek.  On Frank’s blog, you can find instructions for setting up a single node Mesos environment, instructions for setting up a multi-node environment, and instructions for building multi-node HA environments in various configurations.  The one thing to keep in mind is that Frank’s instructions are based on VMware ESXi based VMs; so while almost everything works as written, you may see some quirks running his setup on something like VirtualBox.  There are other similar resources that you can easily find on the internet.

The instructions above will help you create a test environment that includes Apache Mesos and at least one framework, such as Apache Marathon.  Most of the blog posts will also offer examples of tasks you can run to see Mesos in action.

2014-08-25_mesos-test-execFinally, I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Mesos is really designed to be the kernel for a datacenter operating system and that a company called Mesosphere is attempting to wrap a set of tools around Mesos to build a full-blown datacenter OS.  This week, Mesosphere announced the public beta of their flagship product, Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).  So if you are interested in trying that out, you can sign up to be a beta customer.

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I hope you have fun trying out Apache Mesos.  As always, any feedback is welcomed.

7 comments

  2. […] A key capability that makes Apache Mesos a viable uber resource manager for the data center is its ability to play traffic cop amongst a diversity of workloads.  The purpose of this post will be to dig into the internals of resource allocation in Mesos and how it balances fair resource sharing with customer workload needs.  Before going on, you may want to read the other posts in this series if you have not already done so.  An overview of Mesos can be found here, followed by an explanation of its two-level architecture here, and then a post here on data storage and on fault tolerance.  I also write about what I see is going right in the Mesos project.  If you are interested in spinning up and trying out Mesos, I link to some resources in another blog post. […]

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  4. […] You can find my next post on persistent storage and fault tolerance in Mesos here and my post on resource allocation in Mesos here.  I can encourage you to read my post on what I think is going right with the Mesos project.  If you are interested in spinning up and trying out Mesos, I link to some resources in another blog post. […]

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