Verify the capacity of the Equinix Metal facility¶

Before deploying an Equinix Metal based Container Cloud cluster with private networking, ensure that the Equinix Metal project has enough capacity to deploy the required number of machines. Otherwise, the machines will be stuck in the Provisioned state with an error message about no available servers of particular type in your facility.

To verify the capacity of the Equinix Metal facility:

Warning

Mirantis highly recommends using the c3.small.x86 machine type for the control plane machines deployed with private network to prevent hardware issues with incorrect BIOS boot order.

Install the Equinix Metal CLI.
Obtain USER_API_TOKEN for the Equinix Metal authentication:
1. Log in to the Equinix Metal console.
2. Capture the existing API key with the Read/Write permissions or create a new one:
  1. In Personal Settings > Personal API Keys, click Add New Key.
  2. Fill in the Description and select the Read/Write permissions.
  3. Click Add Key.
Configure the Equinix Metal authentication by exporting the METAL_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable. Replace USER_API_TOKEN with your USER_API_TOKEN:
```
export METAL_AUTH_TOKEN=USER_API_TOKEN
```
For more details, see Equinix Metal authentication.
Verify the capacity of the Equinix Metal facility selected for the management cluster bootstrap:
```
metal capacity check -f $EQUINIX_FACILITY -P $EQUINIX_MACHINE_TYPE -q $MACHINES_AMOUNT
```
Note

Depending on your metal CLI version, naming of flags may vary. To verify naming of flags available for your metal CLI version, run metal capacity check --help.

In the command above, replace $EQUINIX_FACILITY, $EQUINIX_MACHINE_TYPE and $MACHINES_AMOUNT with corresponding values of your cluster.

For example, to verify that Equinix Metal can create 6 machines of the c3.small.x86 type in the am6 facility, run:
```
metal capacity check -f am6 -P c3.small.x86 -q 6
```
In the system response, verify that the AVAILABILITY section has the true value.

Example of a positive system response:
```
+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+
| FACILITY |     PLAN     | QUANTITY | AVAILABILITY |
+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+
| am6      | c3.small.x86 | 6        | true         |
+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+
```

Proceed to Bootstrap a management cluster.