Sneak Preview We Give You More Fantastic VSA Configurations by Isak June 22, 2016 Howto Well yes, it's time for some pre middle ages holidays in Sweden. While we sing silly songs and having a blast, you get to read our final sneak preview of Vidispine 4.6 before release (also having a blast). This time you will get more goodies around VSA in a Vidispine clustered configuration.
With vidispine-server it is easier than ever to set up a high-availability configuration with Vidispine. Install Solr with ZooKeeper, use a stand-alone ActiveMQ, and any redundant PostgreSQL/MySQL solution, and you are ready to launch any number of vidispine-server instances. However, the Vidispine Server Agent (VSA) could only connect to one Vidispine instance. This caused things to break, as any Vidispine instance might have to connect to VSA to execute jobs. Not any longer with VS 4.6.
Let's start with some diagrams. The normal setup for VSA in 4.4 and 4.5 is by using the operating system's SSH service, see Figure 1.
As a sidenote, in version 4.6, we also introduces the possibility of not using SSH at all, which can be used if both VS and VSA are in a VPC/VPN, see Figure 2, and read more about it in a previous VSA sneak preview.
The SSH configuration in 4.4/4.5 depends on the operating system, and it requires a special user to be created. In VS 4.6, this is no longer necessary. Instead, vidispine-server bundles its own SSH server, which listens to its own port and does not require any other Linux user account. In addition, the bundled SSH server is really locked down, it does not even have the shell subsystem enabled. See Figure 3. The new model is also great if you are using Docker or other container services, where SSH provided by that operating system might be more than a one-liner, or where you do not want to enable SSH. Just map any port to port 8183 in the container, and enable the VSA node.
In order to enable the VSA node, you need to do three things:
Enable the VSA port in vidispine-server. This is done by adding these two lines to your server.yaml file, and restarting vidispine-server.
Shell
vsaconnection: bindPort: 8183
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vsaconnection:
bindPort: 8183
Add the VSA node to vidispine-server. This is done using the vidispine-admin tool.
$ vidispine-admin.py vsa-add-node enter administrator user name (Enter for admin): enter administrator password: enter internal address for Vidispine (Enter for localhost): enter VS API port (Enter for 8080): enter external address for Vidispine: vsnode1.example.com enter external VSA port for Vidispine (Enter for system default): enter unique name for this node (optional but recommended, if not entered host name will be used): vsanode_kigali enter uuid for this node (optional): do you want to add more VS nodes? (HA/cluster setup) y/n: y enter external address for Vidispine: vsnode2.example.com enter external VSA port for Vidispine (Enter for system default): do you want to add more VS nodes? (HA/cluster setup) y/n: n add VSA node..................: ok #Copy this content to /etc/vidispine/agent.conf on the VSA machine and restart the vidispine-agent service #Wed Jun 22 10:30:26 CEST 2016 uuid=f57fca56-be27-43d5-8016-c8840ba4a875 connectionString=vsnode1.example.com\t8183\tf57fca56-be27-43d5-8016-c8840ba4a875\t-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\nMIIBuwIBAAKBgQDtSGUCF1rGbNKaO5Noeqcg A58f0zS2OQdz/MN14uTa4IwrMzT\njT/Wq2gJz5IjYvR9yCtnkgHUFoTFhvPkeiBY6M3N86Wuk9tMBPgMWnurcN6hEGUZ\njKM1R2NpZiQ70PCM31jIvG27LiM24XuZH6lmBh3U6DxDKBXsz480fPeL9wIVAKcY\nBrnl5LONcBfsPI8O1dG4HCEDAoGBAKHMdBWK6tDJxDsJVhIbHChfmqTisbc1L6Vy\nuRIeUwM5Cje0HsRmzOVrX0Vqyt80B0mh9QWrgWUWZIE3VsObLQvAj3eUdV8X7KJW\nj7yArvYVSAs2OQlbiwX/pmmuO3A01YxfUsQXPEk9EF68KDrCh4PoNNLPE58Z bjM\nfyXIeiOnAoGAA/4ORZTAq2qB50n1GiKjIbODxHvsvep8kl6H/PTw5r2DLlC4d6dl\nx 0h2fJLGJIMH6HWEfd9AUcvfR WeRAVuujlDOkYW9DOxh3MZ pS/CUhBAfhElWb\nO1V9nUc2ve2Na10LXs3qIbItbsC1/DVTOh1mtJu58KG7Po3SFX/W49ECFEuOdhk4\nq8B77dic2HQTBcWHb1a8\n-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n connectionString1=vsnode2.example.com\t8183\tf57fca56-be27-43d5-8016-c8840ba4a875\t-----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\nMIIBuwIBAAKBgQDtSGUCF1rGbNKaO5Noeqcg A58f0zS2OQdz/MN14uTa4IwrMzT\njT/Wq2gJz5IjYvR9yCtnkgHUFoTFhvPkeiBY6M3N86Wuk9tMBPgMWnurcN6hEGUZ\njKM1R2NpZiQ70PCM31jIvG27LiM24XuZH6lmBh3U6DxDKBXsz480fPeL9wIVAKcY\nBrnl5LONcBfsPI8O1dG4HCEDAoGBAKHMdBWK6tDJxDsJVhIbHChfmqTisbc1L6Vy\nuRIeUwM5Cje0HsRmzOVrX0Vqyt80B0mh9QWrgWUWZIE3VsObLQvAj3eUdV8X7KJW\nj7yArvYVSAs2OQlbiwX/pmmuO3A01YxfUsQXPEk9EF68KDrCh4PoNNLPE58Z bjM\nfyXIeiOnAoGAA/4ORZTAq2qB50n1GiKjIbODxHvsvep8kl6H/PTw5r2DLlC4d6dl\nx 0h2fJLGJIMH6HWEfd9AUcvfR WeRAVuujlDOkYW9DOxh3MZ pS/CUhBAfhElWb\nO1V9nUc2ve2Na10LXs3qIbItbsC1/DVTOh1mtJu58KG7Po3SFX/W49ECFEuOdhk4\nq8B77dic2HQTBcWHb1a8\n-----END DSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n operationMode=VSA-VS vxaname=vsanode_kigali fingerPrint=a3\:30\:6d\:04\:37\:46\:fb\:5d\:dd\:10\:4b\:8f\:4e\:6e\:91\:72
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$ vidispine-admin.py vsa-add-node
enter administrator user name (Enter for admin):
enter administrator password:
enter internal address for Vidispine (Enter for localhost):
enter VS API port (Enter for 8080):
enter external address for Vidispine: vsnode1.example.com
enter external VSA port for Vidispine (Enter for system default):
enter unique name for this node (optional but recommended, if not entered host name will be used): vsanode_kigali
enter uuid for this node (optional):
do you want to add more VS nodes? (HA/cluster setup) y/n: y
enter external address for Vidispine: vsnode2.example.com
enter external VSA port for Vidispine (Enter for system default):
do you want to add more VS nodes? (HA/cluster setup) y/n: n
add VSA node..................: ok
#Copy this content to /etc/vidispine/agent.conf on the VSA machine and restart the vidispine-agent service
#Wed Jun 22 10:30:26 CEST 2016
uuid=f57fca56-be27
