spdocker/source/server/index.md

title	header-img	date	description	related
Server	img/header_img/server.jpg	2018-03-07 09:50:12	Spectrum Protect Server in a Docker Container	page title firstrun Initial Container Setup page title normalrun Normal Run of Container page title upgrade Upgrading SP page title recover Recoverying the SP Database

Putting Spectrum Protect into a Container

(These instructions as based on Spectrum Protect 8.1.1. References to SP means Spectrum Protect.)

NOTES

• Depending how your storage volumes are provisioned to running containers, you may need to increase the "default size" of a provisioned volume. For example if your storage driver is devicemapper then the default volume size Base Device Size may be 10GB, which wont be enough for a SP installation. You will need to increase it to at least 15GB - details on how to do that are outside of the scope of this document.
• Also make sure your host has sufficient memory to perform the build - SP requires at least 12GB of RAM to pass the installation logic. I actually perform the build on an iMac with 16GB of memory allocated to Docker. It is also using the overlay storage driver, which means the size of the volume the build container gets is the available free capacity of my /Users mount point.
• The accompaning files for this build are available in my gitlab
• And lastly, most importantly, running SP in a container is not officially supported by IBM - so you cannot make a helpdesk call about having problems. Technically it should work without problems, but if you are experiencing a problem, be prepaid to recreate your environment on a physical host and validate that your problem still exists (and thus not a result of Docker or the implementation on Docker).

Create your Dockerfile

As at the time of writing these instructions, Red Hat linux is not available in the Docker hub - but CentOS is a good clone. We'll use it

Image preparation

FROM centos:7

Next we need to install some dependancies - these are documented in the Knowledge Center as a requirement for running SP on Linux. You might like to check to make sure these are still all that is required for newer releases of SP.

RUN yum -y install http://yum.leenooks.net/CentOS/7/base/redhat-release-7-6.el7.centos.12.2.x86_64.rpm \
 libaio \
 ksh \
 compat-libstdc++-33 \
 numactl && \
 yum clean all && rm -rf /var/tmp/*

NOTE: During the installation of SP, it tests to make sure it is running on RedHat linux by testing the existence of an RPM package redhat-release. The redhat-release installed on line 1 is a fake RPM package - it installs no files, but just emulates the existance of that required RPM package.

Spectrum Protect Installation

Now copy in our silent install configuration files. These files are based on the silent install xml files that come on the installation media. Some details on these files are also in the Knowledge Center

COPY install.xml install-fp.xml /tmp/

NOTE: We only include the silent install configuration files here - not the installation media, otherwise the size of the resulting Docker image is too big. Current versions of docker build do provide the ability to "flatten" the resulting container, but those instructions are outside the scope of this tutorial.

Next, is performing a silent installation of SP.

RUN SOURCE_URL=http://YOUR_SITE_URL_HERE && \
 mkdir -p /tmp/build/8.1.0 && cd /tmp/build/8.1.0 && \
 curl -SL ${SOURCE_URL}/8.1.0 > tsm && \
 chmod +x tsm && ./tsm && rm -f tsm && \
 ./install.sh -s -input /tmp/install.xml -acceptLicense && \
 rm -rf /tmp/build/8.1.0 && \
 mkdir -p /tmp/build/8.1.x && cd /tmp/build/8.1.x && \
 curl -SL ${SOURCE_URL}/8.1.x > tsm && \
 chmod +x tsm && ./tsm && rm -f tsm && \
 ./install.sh -s -input /tmp/install-fp.xml -acceptLicense && df && \
 rm -rf /tmp/install* /tmp/build/8.1.x

NOTE: Some information on what is occuring here.

• This is an "new install" (lines 1-6) then followed by an "upgrade" (lines 7-11). The reason for the new install first, is that the Spectrum Protect license files and license libraries are not available in upgrades (from Fix Central). So you'll need to install from your downloaded media from Passport Advantage, and then upgrade it to the latest release from Fix Central. If you sourced your installation media from Passport Advantage, then the license files and libraries are probably in that installation media, so you only need to run lines 1-6.
• To avoid the resulting Docker Image being too large, we download the installation media from a web server (Line 3) and then delete it after it has been expanded (line 4). We also do the same for up upgrade package (lines 8 & 9).
• Lines 5 and 10 are silent installation methods for install SP and applying updates.
• Lines 6 and 11 delete any installation files to reduce the size of the resulting Docker Image.

Spectrum Protect Post-Installation

Now we set our user environment that will utlimately run SP

ENV USER=tsm USERDIR=/tsm USERID=201 GROUPID=201

NOTE: You can set these according to your enterprise policy. USERDIR will ultimately need to be persistant storage using your favourite storage provisioning methodology. I generally host mount when starting the container using -v /host/path/user:/tsm and it works well. I have used some 3rd party persistent storage offerings, however, they often have not worked. While I havent explored in detail why not, I suspect it is because of Direct IO calls being made by DB2 and those 3rd party offerings not supporting those sytem calls.

Now we create our user

RUN groupadd servers -g ${GROUPID} && useradd -d ${USERDIR} -u ${USERID} -g ${GROUPID} -s /bin/bash ${USER}

Copy some default Server configuration files in place

COPY dsmserv.opt tsmdbmgr.opt ${USERDIR}/
COPY dsm.sys /opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/dbbkapi/
RUN chmod a+r /opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/dbbkapi/dsm.sys

We'll now do some post installation setup, first create the DB2 instance for our user and change the default directory for the database to be the same as the instance directory for the server.

RUN /opt/tivoli/tsm/db2/instance/db2icrt -a server -s ese -u ${USER} ${USER} && \
 mkdir -m 750 /database && \
 chown ${USER}:servers /database /tsm/dsmserv.opt /tsm/tsmdbmgr.opt && \
 su ${USER} -lc "db2 update dbm cfg using dftdbpath ${USERDIR} && db2set -i ${USER} DB2NOEXITLIST=ON"

NOTE: Keep all these commands on one RUN line otherwise the db2 update dbm command will fail with an SQL6031N error.

Setup sqllib/userprofile

RUN su ${USER} -lc "echo setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/dbbkapi:/usr/local/ibm/gsk8_64/lib64:\\\$LD_LIBRARY_PATH >> sqllib/usercshrc && echo export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/dbbkapi:/usr/local/ibm/gsk8_64/lib64:\\\$LD_LIBRARY_PATH >> sqllib/userprofile && echo export DSMI_CONFIG=${USERDIR}/tsmdbmgr.opt >> sqllib/userprofile && echo export DSMI_DIR=/opt/tivoli/tsm/server/bin/dbbkapi >> sqllib/userprofile && echo export DSMI_LOG=${USERDIR} >> sqllib/userprofile"

When SP starts on a new install, there are no ADMINs defined, so here is a macro to help us.

COPY admin.macro /tsm/

Final Docker Image Parameters

And our final Docker Image settings for when our container starts.

COPY init /sbin/

EXPOSE 1500 1543
VOLUME [ "${USERDIR}","/database","/data" ]
ENTRYPOINT [ "/sbin/init" ]
CMD [ "start" ]

A complete Dockerfile is available here if you need one as a starting point. Once you have your images loaded on a web server, the config files, you are reading to run docker build -t ibm/spectrumprotect:8.1.x .

If your final build is successful, you should see a Docker Image that is about 3GB.

REPOSITORY           TAG     IMAGE ID      CREATED        SIZE
ibm/spectrumprotect  8.1.1   14aba816e231  2 minutes ago  2.96GB

NOTES

• Make sure you have enough space in your /var/lib/docker directory - the build will use about 9 GBs.

Now that your container is built, you'll want to start it a specific way, depending on whether you are starting a clean new instance of SP, or an existing instance. Those details are here.