Before you begin

Before you start the cluster deployment, verify that your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements for a vSphere-based management cluster:

Note

For the bootstrap node, you can use any local machine running Ubuntu 20.04 with the following resources:

  • 2 vCPUs

  • 4 GB of RAM

  • 5 GB of available storage

Minimum hardware requirements for a management cluster

Resource

Requirement

# of hypervisors

1

# of nodes

3 (HA)

# of vCPUs

24 (8 vCPUs per node)

RAM in GB

72 (24 per node)

Storage in GB

360 (120 per node) that must be shared to the hypervisor

RHEL license (for RHEL deployments only)

1 RHEL license for Virtual Datacenters per hypervisor

Obligatory vSphere capabilities
DRS,
Shared datastore

IP subnet size

Minimum 20 IPs:

  • 1 for load balancing

  • 3 for nodes

  • 6 for Container Cloud services

  • 5 for StackLight services

  • 5 auxiliary IPs for basic verification testing

Also, consider the supported VMware vSphere network objects and IPAM recommendations.
Minimum software requirements for a management cluster

Software

Version

Operating system distribution
For the bootstrap node: Ubuntu 20.04 or RHEL 8.7
For the Container Cloud clusters:

  • RHEL 7.9 or 8.7 1

  • CentOS 7.9 1

  • Ubuntu 20.04

VMware vSphere

7.0 or 6.7

cloud-init version 2

19.4 for RHEL/CentOS 7.9, 20.3 for RHEL 8.7 1

VMware Tools version 2

11.0.5
1(1,2,3)

  • RHEL 8.7 is generally available since Cluster releases 16.0.0 and 14.1.0. Before these Cluster releases, it is supported within the Technology Preview features scope.

  • CentOS 7.9 is supported as TechPreview.

  • A Container Cloud cluster based on both RHEL and CentOS operating systems or on mixed RHEL versions, such as RHEL 7.9 and 8.7, is not supported.

2(1,2)

The minimal open-vm-tools and cloud-init packages versions built for the VM template.