System requirements

Use this information when planning your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installations and designing automation mesh topologies that fit your use case.

Prerequisites
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  • Obtain root access either through the sudo command, or through privilege escalation.
    • De-escalate privileges from root to users such as: AWX, PostgreSQL, Event-Driven Ansible, or Pulp.
  • Configured an NTP client on all nodes.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform system requirements
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Your system must meet the following minimum system requirements to install and run Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

A resilient deployment requires 10 virtual machines with a minimum of 16 gigabytes (GB) of RAM and 4 virtual CPUs (vCPU). See Choose a deployment method and topology for more information on topology options.

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Table 1. Base system
Type Description Notes

Subscription

Valid Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription

Operating system
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 or later minor versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are also supported on OpenShift, see Installing on OpenShift Container Platform for more information.

CPU architecture

x86_64, AArch64, s390x (IBM Z), ppc64le (IBM Power)

Ansible-core

Ansible-core version 2.16 or later

Ansible Automation Platform uses the system-wide ansible-core package to install the platform, but uses ansible-core 2.16 for both its control plane and built-in execution environments.

Browser

A currently supported version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

Database
  • For Ansible Automation Platform managed databases: PostgreSQL 15.
  • For customer provided (external) databases: PostgreSQL 15, 16, or 17.
  • External (customer supported) databases require International Components for Unicode (ICU) support.
  • External databases using PostgreSQL 16 or 17 must rely on external backup and restore processes. Backup and restore functionality is dependent on utilities provided with PostgreSQL 15.

IP version

IPv4, IPv6 (single-stack and dual-stack)
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Table 2. Virtual machine requirements
Component RAM vCPU Disk IOPS Storage

Platform gateway

16GB

4

3000

60GB minimum

Control nodes

16GB

4

3000

80GB minimum with at least 20GB available under /var/lib/awx

Execution nodes

16GB

4

3000

60GB minimum

Hop nodes

16GB

4

3000

60GB minimum

Automation hub

16GB

4

3000

60GB minimum with at least 40GB allocated to /var/lib/pulp

Database

16GB

4

3000

100GB minimum allocated to /var/lib/pgsql

Event-Driven Ansible controller

16GB

4

3000

60GB minimum
Note

These are minimum requirements and can be increased for larger workloads in increments of 2x (for example 16GB becomes 32GB and 4 vCPU becomes 8vCPU). See Horizontally scale tested deployment models to improve performance for more information.

Repository requirements
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Enable the following repositories only when installing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform:

  • RHEL BaseOS
  • RHEL AppStream
Note

If you enable repositories besides those mentioned above, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installation could fail unexpectedly.

The following are necessary for you to work with project updates and collections:

  • Ensure that the Network ports and protocols table are available for successful connection and download of collections from automation hub or Ansible Galaxy server.

Additional notes for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform requirements
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  • The Ansible Automation Platform database backups are staged on each node at /var/backups/automation-platform through the variable backup_dir. You might need to mount a new volume to /var/backups or change the staging location with the variable backup_dir to prevent issues with disk space before running the ./setup.sh -b script.
  • If performing a bundled Ansible Automation Platform installation, the installation setup.sh script attempts to install ansible-core (and its dependencies) from the bundle for you.
  • If you have installed Ansible-core manually, the Ansible Automation Platform installation setup.sh script detects that Ansible has been installed and does not attempt to reinstall it.
Note

You must use Ansible-core, which is installed by using DNF. Ansible-core version 2.16 is required for versions 2.6 and later.

Platform gateway system requirements
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Platform gateway is the service that handles authentication and authorization for Ansible Automation Platform. It provides a single entry into the platform and serves the platform’s user interface.

Automation controller system requirements
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Automation controller is a distributed system, where different software components can be co-located or deployed across many compute nodes.

The installation program provides four node types as abstractions to help you design the topology appropriate for your use case: control, hybrid, execution, and hop nodes.

Use the following recommendations for node sizing:

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Table 3. Recommended Resource Sizing for Automation controller Node Types
Node Type RAM (Minimum) vCPU (Minimum) Disk IOPS (Minimum) Storage and Notes

Execution Node

16 GB

4 vCPU

3000

Runs automation. Increase RAM/CPU to increase capacity for concurrent job forks. Performance depends heavily on the number of jobs run simultaneously.

Control Node

16 GB

4 vCPU

3000

Processes events and runs cluster jobs (e.g., project updates). * Storage: 80GB minimum, with at least 20GB available under /var/lib/awx. * Storage Requirement: Volume must be rated for a minimum baseline of 3000 IOPS.

Hybrid Node

16 GB

4 vCPU

3000

A combination of Control and Execution node functions. Storage requirements generally match the Control Node.

Hop Node

16 GB

4 vCPU

3000

Routes traffic within the automation mesh (e.g., bastion host). RAM can affect throughput, but CPU activity is typically low. Network latency is a more important factor than RAM or CPU.
  • Actual RAM requirements vary based on how many hosts automation controller manages simultaneously (which is controlled by the forks parameter in the job template or the system ansible.cfg file). To avoid possible resource conflicts, Ansible recommends 1 GB of memory per 10 forks and 2 GB reservation for automation controller. SeeHow job capacity is determined and impacts job runs. If forks is set to 400, 42 GB of memory is recommended.
  • A larger number of hosts can be addressed, but if the fork number is less than the total host count, more passes across the hosts are required. You can avoid these RAM limitations by using any of the following approaches:
    • Use rolling updates.
    • Use the provisioning callback system built into automation controller, where each system requesting configuration enters a queue and is processed as quickly as possible.
    • In cases where automation controller is producing or deploying images such as AMIs.

Automation hub system requirements
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With Automation hub you can discover and use new certified automation content from Red Hat Ansible and Certified Partners.

On Ansible automation hub, you can discover and manage Ansible Collections, which are supported automation content developed by Red Hat and its partners for use cases such as cloud automation, network automation, and security automation.

Note

Private automation hub

If you install private automation hub from an internal address with a certificate that only encompasses the external address, this can result in an installation that cannot be used as container registry without certificate issues.

To avoid this, use the automationhub_main_url inventory variable with a value such as https://pah.example.com linking to the private automation hub node in the installation inventory file.

This adds the external address to /etc/pulp/settings.py. This implies that you only want to use the external address.

For information about inventory file variables, see Inventory file variables.

High availability automation hub requirements
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Before deploying a high availability (HA) automation hub, ensure that you have a shared storage file system installed in your environment and that you have configured your network storage system, if applicable.

Required shared storage
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Shared storage is required when installing more than one Automation hub with a file storage backend. The supported shared storage type for RPM-based installations is Network File System (NFS).

Before you run the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installer, verify that you installed the /var/lib/pulp directory across your cluster as part of the shared storage file system installation. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installer returns an error if /var/lib/pulp is not detected in one of your nodes, causing your high availability automation hub setup to fail.

If you receive an error stating /var/lib/pulp is not detected in one of your nodes, ensure /var/lib/pulp is properly mounted in all servers and re-run the installation program.

Install firewalld for HA hub deployment
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If you intend to install a HA automation hub using a network storage on the automation hub nodes itself, you must first install and use firewalld to open the necessary ports as required by your shared storage system before running the Ansible Automation Platform installer.

Install and configure firewalld by executing the following commands:

  1. Install the firewalld daemon: 
    $ dnf install firewalld
  2. Add your network storage under <service> using the following command: 
    $ firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=<service>
    Note
    For a list of supported services, use the $ firewall-cmd --get-services command
  3. Reload to apply the configuration: 
    $ firewall-cmd --reload

Event-Driven Ansible system requirements
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The Event-Driven Ansible controller is a single-node system capable of handling a variable number of long-running processes (such as rulebook activations) on-demand, depending on the number of CPU cores.

Use the following minimum requirements for Event-Driven Ansible controller:

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Requirement Required

RAM

16 GB

CPUs

4

Local disk

  • Hard drive must be 40 GB minimum with at least 20 GB available under /var.
  • Storage volume must be rated for a minimum baseline of 3000 IOPS.
  • If the cluster has many large projects or decision environment images, consider doubling the GB in /var to avoid disk space errors.
Important

When you activate an Event-Driven Ansible rulebook under standard conditions, it uses about 250 MB of memory. However, the actual memory consumption can vary significantly based on the complexity of your rules and the volume and size of the events processed. In scenarios where a large number of events are anticipated or the rulebook complexity is high, conduct a preliminary assessment of resource usage in a staging environment. This ensures that your maximum number of activations is based on the capacity of your resources.