Chapter 3. System requirements

Hardware

• An operational, pre-provisioned 3-node RHOCP compact cluster, version 4.16.

• Each node in the compact cluster must have the following resources:

  • 64 GB RAM
  • 16 CPU cores

  • 120GB NVMe or SSD for the root disk plus 250 GB storage (NVMe or SSD is strongly recommended)

    Note

    The images, volumes and root disks for the virtual machine instances running on the deployed environment are hosted on dedicated external storage nodes. However, the service logs, databases, and metadata are stored in a RHOCP Persistent Volume Claim (PVC). A minimum of 150 GB is required for testing.

  • 2 physical NICs

    Note

    In a 6-node cluster with 3 controllers and 3 workers, only the worker nodes require 2 physical NICs.

• Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) storage on the cluster:

  • 150 GB persistent volume (PV) pool for service logs, databases, file import conversion, and metadata.

    Note
    • You must plan the size of the PV pool that you require for your RHOSO pods based on your RHOSO workload. For example, the Image service image conversion PVC should be large enough to host the largest image and that image after it is converted, as well as any other concurrent conversions. You must make similar considerations for the storage requirements if your RHOSO deployment uses the Object Storage service (swift).
    • The PV pool is required for the Image service, however the actual images are stored on the Image service back end, such as Red Hat Ceph Storage or SAN.
  • 5 GB of the available PVs must be backed by local SSDs for control plane services such as the Galera, OVN, and RabbitMQ databases.

Software

• The RHOCP environment supports Multus CNI.

• The following Operators are installed on the RHOCP cluster:

  • The Kubernetes NMState Operator. This Operator must be started by creating an nmstate instance. For information, see Installing the Kubernetes NMState Operator in the RHOCP Networking guide.

  • The MetalLB Operator. This Operator must be started by creating a metallb instance. For information, see Installing the MetalLB Operator in the RHOCP Networking guide.

    Note

    When you start MetalLB with the MetalLB Operator, the Operator starts an instance of a speaker pod on each node in the cluster. When using an extended architecture such as 3 OCP controller/master and 3 OCP computes/workers, if your OCP controllers do not have access to the ctlplane and internalapi networks, you must limit the speaker pods to the OCP compute/worker nodes. For more information about speaker pods, see Limit speaker pods to specific nodes.

  • The cert-manager Operator. For information, see cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift in the RHOCP Security and compliance guide.
  • The Cluster Observability Operator. For information, see Installing the Cluster Observability Operator.
  • The Cluster Baremetal Operator (CBO). The CBO deploys the Bare Metal Operator (BMO) component, which is required to provision bare-metal nodes as part of the data plane deployment process. For more information on planning for bare-metal provisioning, see Planning provisioning for bare-metal data plane nodes.

• The following tools are installed on the cluster workstation:

  • The oc command line tool.
  • The podman command line tool.
• The RHOCP storage back end is configured.
• The RHOCP storage class is defined, and has access to persistent volumes of type ReadWriteOnce.
• For installer-provisioned infrastructure, you must prepare an operating system image for use with bare-metal provisioning. You can use the following image as the bare-metal image: https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/rhel9/rhel-guest-image/6197bdceb4dcabca7fe351d5?container-tabs=overview

Additional resources

• Storage and Post-installation storage configuration

• Pre-provisioned nodes:

  • RHEL 9.4.
  • Configured for SSH access with the SSH keys generated during data plane creation. The SSH user must either be root or have unrestricted and password-less sudo enabled. For more information, see Creating the data plane secrets in the Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift guide.
  • Routable IP address on the control plane network to enable Ansible access through SSH.