Installation Overview¶

Important

Morpheus v4.2.0 enhanced security configuration restricts incoming appliance connections to TLS v1.2, potentially impacting front-end load balancer monitoring/health checks that support only TLS v1.1 or lower, as well as Morpheus Agent installations for Windows nodes using .net versions that do not support TLS v1.2. Refer to TLS

Morpheus comes packaged as a debian or yum based package. The default configuration installs all required services on a single vm or bare metal Host. Morpheus can be configured in a distributed architecture to use one or multiple external services, and multiple application Hosts can be configured for High Availability configurations.

All components required for Morpheus are installed and configured by default during the Morpheus reconfigure command. The Morpheus config file, morpheus.rb, can optionally be configured to point the Morpheus App to external services (distributed configuration).

Morpheus can optionally be configured to use external Database, Messaging, and/or Search Tiers. This means instead of installing, for example, MySQL on the same host as the Morpheus App, the Morpheus configuration file (morpheus.rb) is setup to point to an external MySQL host, cluster or service, and MySQL will not be installed or configured on the Appliance Host.

Install Packages¶

Morpheus Release Package urls can be obtained from https://app.morpheushub.com

Configuration Options¶

Single Host (All-In-One/default)
All tiers running on a single host. The reconfigure process installs all required services. This is the default configuration.
Single Hosts with Distributed Service(s)
Transactional Database, Non-Transactional Database, and/or Message tiers are externalized, with the remaining services on a single host. The reconfigure process installs all services not set to false in /etc/morpheus/morpheus.rb
Clustered Hosts with Distributed Transactional Database (3-Node HA)
Application, Message and Non-Transactional tiers are installed and clustered on three or more hosts, with all three hosts pointing to externalized database tier. The reconfigure process installs all services except mySQL.
App Host(s) with Distributed Services (Full HA)
Application tier is installed on one or more hosts. All UI hosts point to externalized Transactional Database, Non-Transactional Database, and Message Tiers. The reconfigure process installs only Application services.

Distributed Configurations¶

Morpheus provides a wide array of options when it comes to deployment architectures. It can start as a simple one machine instance where all services run on the same machine, or it can be split off into individual services per machine and configured in a high availability configuration, either in the same region or cross-region. Naturally, high availability can grow more complicated, depending on the configuration you want to do and this article will cover the basic concepts of the Morpheus HA architecture that can be used in a wide array of configurations.

There are four primary tiers of services represented within the Morpheus appliance. They are the Application Tier, Transactional Database Tier, Non-Transactional Database Tier, and Message Tier. Each of these tiers have their own recommendations for High availability deployments that we need to cover.

Application Tier¶

The application tier is easily installed with the same Debian or yum repository package that Morpheus is normally distributed with. Advanced configuration allows for the additional tiers to be skipped and leave only the “stateless” services that need run. These stateless services include Nginx and Tomcat. These machines should also have at least 8gb of Memory. They can be configured across all regions and placed behind a central load-balancer or Geo based load-balancer. They typically connect to all other tiers as none of the other tiers talk to each other besides through the central application tier. One final piece when it comes to setting up the Application tier is a shared storage means is necessary when it comes to maintaining things like deployment archives, virtual image catalogs, backups, etc. These can be externalized to an object storage service such as Amazon S3 or Openstack Swiftstack as well. If not using those options a simple NFS cluster can also be used to handle the shared storage structure.

Transactional Database Tier¶

The Transactional database tier usually consists of a MySQL compatible database. It is recommended that a lockable clustered configuration be used (Currently Percona XtraDB Cluster is the most recommended in Permissive Mode). There are several documents online related to configuring and setting up an XtraDB Cluster but it most simply can be laid out in a many master configuration. There can be some nodes setup with replication delay as well as some with no replication delay. It is common practice to have no replication delay within the same region and allow some replication delay cross region. This does increase the risk of job run overlap between the 2 regions however, the concurrent operations typically self-correct and this is a non-issue.

Non-Transactional Database Tier¶

The Non-Transactional tier consists of an ElasticSearch (version 7.6.0) cluster. Elastic Search is used for log aggregation data and temporal aggregation data (essentially stats, metrics, and logs). This enables for a high write throughput at scale. ElasticSearch is a Clustered database meaning all nodes no matter the region need to be connected to each other over what they call a “Transport” protocol. It is fairly simple to get setup as all nodes are identical. It is also a Java-based system and does require a sizable chunk of memory for larger data sets. 8 GB is recommended and more nodes can be added to scale either horizontally or vertically.

Messaging Tier¶

The Messaging tier is an AMQP based tier along with STOMP Protocol (used for agent communication). The primary model recommended is to use RabbitMQ for queue services. RabbitMQ is also a cluster-based queuing system and needs at least 3 instances for HA configurations. This is due to elections in the failover scenarios RabbitMQ can manage. If doing a cross-region HA RabbitMQ cluster, it is recommended to have at least 3 Rabbit queue clusters per region. Typically to handle HA a RabbitMQ cluster should be placed between a load balancer and the front-end application server to handle cross host connections. The ports necessary to forward in a Rabbit MQ cluster are (5672, and 61613). A RabbitMQ cluster can run on smaller memory machines depending on how frequent large requests bursts occur. 4 - 8 GB of Memory is recommended to start.

Pros/Cons¶

Single Host¶

Advantages

Simple Installation - Morpheus Installs all required services
Simple Configuration - Morpheus configures all required services
Simple Maintenance - All service connections and credentials are local - All logs are local - All Data is local (by default)
Not dependent on network connections for vital services - Facilitates speed and reliability

Disadvantages

Single point of failure
Individual services cannot be scaled
Upgrades require (minimal) downtime
Single region

Single Hosts with Distributed Service(s)¶

Advantages

Individual services can be scaled
Managed Services such as RDS can be utilized

Disadvantages

Single region
External services require additional configuration and maintenance
Morpheus is subject to network performance, configuration and availability
Increased Installation time possible

Clustered Hosts with Distributed Transactional Database¶

Advantages

Database can be scaled vertically and/or horizontally
Managed Services such as RDS can be utilized
Zero down time upgrades
No single point of failure
RabbitMQ and Elasticsearch Clusters

Disadvantages

External Database services requires additional configuration and maintenance
App Host Clustering requires additional configuration and maintenance
Extended Installation time
Increased Infrastructure requirements
Load Balancer required to front App Hosts
Shared Storage configuration required

App Host(s) with Distributed Services¶

Advantages

Individual services can be scaled vertically and/or horizontally
Managed Services such as RDS can be utilized
Zero down time upgrades
No single point of failure
Multi region support

Disadvantages

External services require additional configuration and maintenance
Extended Installation time
Increased Infrastructure Requirements
Increased Networking requirements
Load Balancer required to front App Hosts
Shared Storage configuration required
Rabbit Load balancer required