Eon Mode databases on Azure

• 1: Eon Mode on Azure prerequisites
• 2: Manually creating an Eon Mode database on Azure

1 - Eon Mode on Azure prerequisites

Before you can create an Eon Mode database on Azure, you must have a database cluster and an Azure blob storage container to store your database's data.

Cluster requirements

Before you can create an Eon Mode database on Azure, you must provision a cluster to host it. See Configuring your Vertica cluster for Eon Mode for suggestions on choosing VM configurations and the number of nodes your cluster should start with.

Storage requirements

An Eon Mode database on Azure stores its data communally in Azure blob storage. Vertica only supports block blob storage for communal data storage, not append or page blob storage.

You must create a storage path for Vertica to use exclusively. This path can be a blob container or a folder within a blob container. This path must not contain any files. If you attempt to create an Eon Mode database with a container or folder that contains files, admintools returns an error.

You pass Vertica a URI for the storage path using the azb:// schema. See Azure Blob Storage object store for the format of this URI.

You must also configure the storage container so Vertica is authorized to access it. Depending on authentication method you use, you may need to supply Vertica the with credentials to access the container. Vertica can use one of following methods to authenticate with the blob storage container:

• Using Azure managed identities. This authentication method is transparent—you do not need to add any authentication configuration information to Vertica. Vertica automatically uses the managed identity bound to the VMs it runs on to authenticate with the blob storage container. See the Azure AD-managed identities for Azure resources documentation page in the Azure documentation for more information.

  If you provide credentials for either of the other two supported authentication methods, Vertica uses them instead of authenticating using a managed identity bound to your VM.

  Note

  If your Azure VMs have more than one managed identity bound to them, you must tell Vertica which identity to use when authenticating with the blob storage container. Vertica gets the identity to use from a tag set on the VMs that it is running on.

  On your VMs, create a tag with its key named VerticaManagedIdentityClientId and its value to the name of a managed identity bound to your VMs. See the Use tags to organize your Azure resources and management hierarchy page in the Azure documentation for more information.

• Using an account name and access key credentials for a service account that has full access to the blob storage container. In this case, you provide Vertica with the credentials when you create the Eon Mode database. See Creating an Authentication File for details.

• Using a shared access signature (SAS) that grants Vertica access to the storage container. See Grant limited access to Azure Storage resources using shared access signatures (SAS) in the Azure documentation. See Creating an Authentication File for details.

For details on how Vertica accesses Azure blob storage, see Azure Blob Storage object store.

2 - Manually creating an Eon Mode database on Azure

Once you have met the cluster and storage requirements for using an Eon Mode database on Azure, you are ready to create an Eon Mode database. Use the admintools create_db tool to create your Eon Mode database.

Creating an authentication file

If your database will use a managed identity to authenticate with the Azure storage container, you do not need to supply any additional configuration information to the create_db tool.

If your database will not use a managed identity, you must supply create_db with authentication information in a configuration file. It must contain at least the AzureStorageCredentials parameter that defines one or more account names and keys Vertica will use to access blob storage. It can also contain an AzureStorageEnpointConfig parameter that defines an alternate endpoint to use instead of the the default Azure host name. This option is useful if you are creating a test environment using an Azure storage emulator such as Azurite.

The following table defines the values that can be set in these two parameters.

AzureStorageCredentials

Collection of JSON objects, each of which specifies connection credentials for one endpoint. This parameter takes precedence over Azure managed identities.

The collection must contain at least one object and may contain more. Each object must specify at least one of accountName or blobEndpoint, and at least one of accountKey or sharedAccessSignature.

• accountName: If not specified, uses the label of blobEndpoint.
• blobEndpoint: Host name with optional port (host:port). If not specified, uses account.blob.core.windows.net.
• accountKey: Access key for the account or endpoint.
• sharedAccessSignature: Access token for finer-grained access control, if being used by the Azure endpoint.

AzureStorageEndpointConfig

Collection of JSON objects, each of which specifies configuration elements for one endpoint. Each object must specify at least one of accountName or blobEndpoint.

• accountName: If not specified, uses the label of blobEndpoint.
• blobEndpoint: Host name with optional port (host:port). If not specified, uses account.blob.core.windows.net.
• protocol: HTTPS (default) or HTTP.
• isMultiAccountEndpoint: true if the endpoint supports multiple accounts, false otherwise (default is false). To use multiple-account access, you must include the account name in the URI. If a URI path contains an account, this value is assumed to be true unless explicitly set to false.

The authentication configuration file is a text file containing the configuration parameter names and their values. The values are in a JSON format. The name of this file is not important. The following examples use the file name auth_params.conf.

The following example is a configuration file for a storage account hosted on Azure. The storage account name is mystore, and the key value is a placeholder. In your own configuration file, you must provide the storage account's access key. You can find this value by right-clicking the storage account in the Azure Storage Explorer and selecting Copy Primary Key.

AzureStorageCredentials=[{"accountName": "mystore", "accountKey": "access-key"}]

The following example shows a configuration file that defines an account for a storage container hosted on the local system using the Azurite storage system. The user account and key are the "well-known" account provided by Azurite by default. Because this configuration uses an alternate storage endpoint, it also defines the AzureStorageEndpointConfig parameter. In addition to reiterating the account name and endpoint definition, this example sets the protocol to the non-encrypted HTTP.

AzureStorageCredentials=[{"accountName": "devstoreaccount1", "blobEndpoint": "127.0.0.1:10000 ",
                          "accountKey":
"Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw=="
                        }]

AzureStorageEndpointConfig=[{"accountName": "devstoreaccount1",
                             "blobEndpoint": "127.0.0.1:10000", "protocol": "http"}]

Creating the Eon Mode database

Use the admintools create_db tool to create your Eon Mode database. The required arguments you pass to this tool are:

Some other common optional arguments for create_db are:

To view all arguments for the create_db tool, run the command:

admintools -t create_db --help

The following example demonstrates creating an Eon Mode database with the following settings:

• Vertica will use a storage account named mystore.

• The communal data will be stored in a directory named verticadb located in a storage container named db_blobs.

• The authentication information Vertica needs to access the storage container is in the file named auth_params.conf in the current directory. The contents of this file are shown in the first example under Creating an Authentication File.

• The hostnames of the nodes in the cluster are node01 through node03.

$ admintools -t create_db \
             --communal-storage-location=azb://mystore/db_blobs/verticadb \
             -x auth_params.conf -s node01,node02,node03  \
             -d verticadb --depot-path /vertica/depot --shard-count 3 \
             -p 'mypassword'