Install ThoughtSpot on RHEL offline clusters

Before starting the install, make sure that you completed the pre-installation steps.

In an offline cluster, the hosts cannot connect to the public repositories to download the required packages. Instead, you must download the packages from your organization’s mirror repository to each host. Otherwise, the steps for installing on offline clusters are practically the same as the steps for installing on online cluster.

Before you build the ThoughtSpot cluster and install the ThoughtSpot application on the hosts, you must run the Ansible playbook. The TS Ansible playbook prepares your clusters in the following manner:

  • Ansible installs the required packages: YAML, Python, and R packages; see Packages installed with ThoughtSpot for RHEL.
  • It creates and configures local user accounts for ThoughtSpot:
    • admin user has full administrative functionality
    • thoughtspot user can load data in the application
  • It installs the ThoughtSpot CLI, tscli.
  • It configures the ThoughtSpot host nodes:
    • checks that customization scripts can execute on the nodes
    • checks that the partitions meet minimum size requirements
❏ 1. Configure the Ansible Playbook
❏ 2. Redirect the mirror repository
❏ 3. Run the Ansible Playbook
❏ 4. Install ThoughtSpot

Configure the Ansible Playbook

To set up the Ansible, follow these steps:

  1. Obtain the Ansible tarball by joining our RHEL Early Access program, and email us your Ansible request. Download it to your local machine.
  2. Unzip the Ansible tarball, to see the following files and directories on your local machine:
    customize.sh
    This script runs as the last step in the preparation process. You can use it to inject deployment-specific customizations, such as enabling or disabling a corporate proxy, configuring extra SSH keys, installing extra services, and so on. Additionally, you can include the prepare_disks script here. Add the following line to the customize.sh file: sudo /usr/local/scaligent/bin/prepare_disks.sh.
    hosts.sample
    prod_image
    This directory contains the ThoughtSpot tools and tscli, the ThoughtSpot CLI binary.
    README.md
    Basic information for the unzipped file
    rpm_gpg
    This directory contains the GPG keys that authenticate the public repository.
    toolchain
    The tools that are necessary to compile the instructions you define in the Ansible Playbook, the source code, into executables that can run on your device. The toolchain includes a compiler, a linker, and run-time libraries.
    ts-rhel-new.yaml
    The Ansible Playbook for new installations.
    ts-rhel-update.yaml
    The Ansible Playbook for updates.
    ts-rhel.yaml
    yum.repos.d
    This directory contains information about the yum repo used by the cluster.
  3. Copy the Ansible inventory file hosts.sample to hosts.yaml, and using a text editor of your choice, update the file to include your host configuration:
    hosts
    Add the IP addresses or hostnames of all hosts in the ThoughtSpot cluster.
    admin_uid
    The admin user ID parameter.
    On-premise deployments
    Use the default values.
    AWS
    Use the default values.
    GCP
    Add values that are not currently in use. To determine what values your system uses already, run the following command:
    cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ":" -f3-4| sort
    admin_gid
    The admin user group ID.
    On-premise deployments
    Use the default values.
    AWS
    Use the default values.
    GCP
    Add values that are not currently in use. To determine what values your system uses already, run the following command:
    cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ":" -f3-4| sort
    ssh_user

    The ssh_user must exist on the ThoughtSpot host, and it must have sudo privileges.

    On-premise deployments
    The ssh_user is the user who runs the playbook, and who is connected to the hosts.
    AWS
    The same as ec2_user.
    GCP
    The ssh_user is the user who runs the playbook, and who is connected to the hosts.
    ssh_private_key
    Add the private key for ssh access to the hosts.yaml file. You can use an existing key pair, or generate a new key pair in the Ansible Control server.
    Run the following command to verify that the Ansible Control Server can connect to the hosts over ssh:
    ansible -m ping -i hosts.yaml all
    ssh_public_key
    Add the public key to the ssh authorized_keys file for each host, and add the private key to the hosts.yaml file. You can use an existing key pair, or generate a new key pair in the Ansible Control server.
    Run the following command to verify that the Ansible Control Server can connect to the hosts over ssh:
    ansible -m ping -i hosts.yaml all
    extra_admin_ssh_key
    [Optional] An additional or extra key may be required by your security application, such as Qualys, to connect to the hosts.
    http(s)_proxy
    If the hosts must access public repositories through an internal proxy service, provide the proxy information.
    This release of ThoughtSpot does not support proxy credentials to authenticate to the proxy service.
    ts_partition_name
    The extended name of the ThoughtSpot export partition, such as /dev/sdb1.

Redirect the mirror repository

For the cluster hosts to connect to your organization mirror repository, you must redirect the hosts requests to the mirror repository, through the DNS.

Alternatively, you can manually update the repository URLs in the yum.repos.d file.

Run the Ansible Playbook

First, to allow installation of the Yum, Python, and R packages, you must run the run_offline script on your local machine. Run the following command on all nodes:

run_offline.sh

Now you can run the Ansible Playbook from your local machine by entering the following command:

ansible-playbook -i hosts.yaml ts-rhel.yaml

As the Ansible Playbook runs, it will perform these tasks:

  1. Trigger the installation of RPM packages.
  2. Configure the local user accounts that the ThoughtSpot application uses
  3. Install the ThoughtSpot CLI
  4. Configure all the nodes in the ThoughtSpot cluster:
    • Format and create export partitions, if they do not exist
    • Format the data disks, and run prepare disks

After the Ansible Playbook finishes, run the prepare_disks script on every node, if you did not include it in the customize.sh file. Specify the data drives by adding the full device path for all data drives, such as /dev/sdc, after the script name. Separate data drives with a space.

sudo /usr/local/scaligent/bin/prepare_disks.sh /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

Your hosts are ready for installing the ThoughtSpot application.

Install the ThoughtSpot cluster and the application

Refer to the ThoughtSpot documentation for the detailed steps to install the ThoughtSpot cluster for each deployment platform:

Follow these general steps to install ThoughtSpot on the prepared hosts:

  1. Connect to the host as an admin user.
  2. Download the release artifact from the ThoughtSpot file sharing system.
  3. Upload the release artifact to your organization’s mirror repository.
  4. Run the tscli cluster create command. This script prompts for user input.
  5. Check the cluster health by running health checks and logging into the application.