Install InfluxDB Enterprise meta nodes

InfluxDB Enterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management UI (via Chronograf) for working with clusters. The 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–meta nodes.

• Meta node setup and requirements
  • At least three meta nodes
  • License key or file
  • Networking
  • User account
• Set up meta nodes:
  1. Add DNS entries
  2. Set up, configure, and start the meta services
     1. Download and install the meta service
     2. Edit the configuration file
     3. Start the meta service
  3. Join meta nodes to the cluster

Meta node setup and requirements

• At least three meta nodes
• License key or file
• Networking
• User account

At least three meta nodes

The installation process sets up three meta nodes, with each meta node running on its own server.

InfluxDB Enterprise clusters require an odd number of at least three meta nodes for high availability and redundancy. We typically recommend three meta nodes. If your servers have chronic communication or reliability issues, you can try adding nodes.

See Clustering in InfluxDB Enterprise for more information about cluster architecture.

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.

Networking

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.

User account

The installation package creates an influxdb user on the operating system. The influxdb user runs the InfluxDB meta service. The influxdb user also owns certain files needed to start the service. In some cases, local policies may prevent the local user account from being created and the service fails to start. Contact your systems administrator for assistance with this requirement.

Set up meta nodes

1. Add DNS entries
2. Set up, configure, and start the meta services
   1. Download and install the meta service
   2. Edit the configuration file
   3. Start the meta service
3. Join meta nodes to the cluster

Add DNS entries

Ensure that your servers’ hostnames and IP addresses are added to your network’s DNS environment. The addition of DNS entries and IP assignment is usually site and policy specific. Contact your DNS administrator for assistance as necessary. Ultimately, use entries similar to the following (hostnames and domain IP addresses are representative).

Verify DNS resolution

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

We highly recommend that each server be able to resolve the IP from the hostname alone as shown here. Resolve any connectivity issues before proceeding with the installation. A healthy cluster requires that every meta node can communicate with every other meta node.

Set up, configure, and start the meta services

Perform the following steps on each meta server:

1. Download and install the meta service
2. Edit the configuration file
3. Start the meta service

Download and install the meta service

InfluxDB Enterprise 1.11+ provides a standard build and a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)-compliant build. Instructions for both are provided below.

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta_1.11.3-c1.11.3-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.11.3-c1.11.3-1_amd64.deb

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/fips/influxdb-meta_1.11.3-c1.11.3-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.11.3-c1.11.3-1_amd64.deb

RedHat & CentOS (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/fips/influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm.asc

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/fips/influxdb-meta-1.11.3_c1.11.3-1.x86_64.rpm.asc

Edit the configuration file

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

• Uncomment hostname and set to the full hostname of the meta node.

• Uncomment internal-shared-secret in the [meta] section and set it to a long pass phrase to be used in JWT authentication for intra-node communication. This value must the same for all of your meta nodes and match the [meta] meta-internal-shared-secret settings in the configuration files of your data nodes.

• 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.

  The license-key and license-path settings are mutually exclusive and one must remain set to the empty string.

If using a FIPS-compliant InfluxDB Enterprise build, also do the following:

• Set [enterprise].license-path to the local path to the JSON license file you received from InfluxData.
• Set [meta].password-hash to pbkdf2-sha256 or pbkdf2-sha512.

# 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

[meta]
  # FIPS-compliant builds do not support bcrypt for password hashing
  password-hash = "pbkdf2-sha512"

Start the meta service

service influxdb-meta start

sudo systemctl start influxdb-meta

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep influxdb-meta

influxdb  3207  0.8  4.4 483000 22168 ?        Ssl  17:05   0:08 /usr/bin/influxd-meta -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb-meta.conf

Join meta nodes to the cluster

From one and only one meta node, join all meta nodes including itself. For 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

influxd-ctl show

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

Meta Nodes
==========
TCP Address               Version
enterprise-meta-01:8091   1.11.3-c1.11.3
enterprise-meta-02:8091   1.11.3-c1.11.3
enterprise-meta-03:8091   1.11.3-c1.11.3

After your meta nodes are part of your cluster, install data nodes.