Step 1 - Installing InfluxDB Enterprise meta nodes

InfluxDB Enterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management user interface (using Chronograf) for working with clusters. The Production Installation process is designed for users looking to deploy InfluxDB Enterprise in a production environment. The following steps will get you up and running with the first essential component of your InfluxDB Enterprise cluster: the meta nodes.

If you wish to evaluate InfluxDB Enterprise in a non-production environment, feel free to follow the instructions outlined in the QuickStart installation section. 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.

Meta node setup description and requirements

The Production Installation process sets up three meta nodes, each running on a dedicated server.

You must have a minimum of three meta nodes in a cluster. InfluxDB Enterprise clusters require at least three meta nodes and an odd number of meta nodes for high availability and redundancy. We do not recommend having more than three meta nodes unless your servers, or the communication between the servers, have chronic reliability issues.

Note: While there is no requirement for each meta node to run on its own server, deploying multiple meta nodes on the same server creates a larger point of potential failure if that node is unresponsive. InfluxData recommends deploying meta nodes on servers with relatively small footprints.

See Clustering in InfluxDB Enterprise for more on cluster architecture.

Other 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.

Ports

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

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

Meta node setup

Step 1: Modify the /etc/hosts file

Add your servers’ hostnames and IP addresses to each of the cluster server’s /etc/hosts file (the hostnames below are representative).

<Meta_1_IP> enterprise-meta-01
<Meta_2_IP> enterprise-meta-02
<Meta_3_IP> enterprise-meta-03

Verify the meta nodes are resolvable

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:

ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-01
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-02
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-03

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

Step 2: Set up, configure, and start the meta node services

Complete the following steps for each meta node server.

2.1: Download and install the meta node services

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta_1.5.4-c1.5.4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.5.4-c1.5.4_amd64.deb

RedHat and CentOS (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta-1.5.4_c1.5.4.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-meta-1.5.4_c1.5.4.x86_64.rpm

2.2: Edit the configuration file

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

• Uncomment and set hostname to the 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="<enterprise-meta-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

2.3: Start the meta service

On sysvinit systems, run:

service influxdb-meta start

On systemd systems, run:

sudo systemctl start influxdb-meta

Verify the meta node service started

Check to see that the service 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

Note: A cluster with only one meta node is not recommended for production environments. You can start the cluster with a single meta node using the -single-server flag when starting the single meta node.

Join the meta nodes to the cluster

Using only one meta node, join all meta nodes. In our example, from enterprise-meta-01, run:

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-01:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-02:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-03:8091

Note: Specify the hostname of the meta node during the join process. Do not specify localhost, which can cause cluster connection issues.

The expected output is:

Added meta node x at enterprise-meta-0x:8091

Verify your meta nodes installation

Issue the following command on any meta node:

influxd-ctl show

The expected output is:

Data Nodes
==========
ID      TCP Address      Version

Meta Nodes
==========
TCP Address               Version
enterprise-meta-01:8091   1.5.4-c1.5.4
enterprise-meta-02:8091   1.5.4-c1.5.4
enterprise-meta-03:8091   1.5.4-c1.5.4

Your cluster must have at least three meta nodes. If you do not see your meta nodes in the output, retry adding them to the cluster.

Once your meta nodes are part of your cluster, you can proceed to installing your data nodes.