Requirements for a VMware vSphere-based cluster

Note

Container Cloud is developed and tested on VMware vSphere 7.0 and 6.7.

For system requirements for a bootstrap node, see Requirements for a bootstrap node.

If you use a firewall or proxy, make sure that the bootstrap, management, and regional clusters have access to the following IP ranges and domain names:

  • IP ranges:

  • Domain names:

    • mirror.mirantis.com and repos.mirantis.com for packages

    • binary.mirantis.com for binaries and Helm charts

    • mirantis.azurecr.io for Docker images

    • mcc-metrics-prod-ns.servicebus.windows.net:9093 for Telemetry (port 443 if proxy is enabled)

    • mirantis.my.salesforce.com for Salesforce alerts

Note

  • Access to Salesforce is required from any Container Cloud cluster type.

  • If any additional Alertmanager notification receiver is enabled, for example, Slack, its endpoint must also be accessible from the cluster.

Requirements for a vSphere-based Container Cloud cluster

Resource

Management cluster

Managed cluster

Comments

# of nodes

3 (HA)

5 (6 with StackLight HA)

  • A bootstrap cluster requires access to the vSphere API.

  • A management cluster requires 3 nodes for the manager nodes HA. Adding more than 3 nodes to a management or regional cluster is not supported.

  • A managed cluster requires 3 nodes for the manager nodes HA and 2 nodes for the Container Cloud workloads. If the multiserver mode is enabled for StackLight, 3 nodes are required for the Container Cloud workloads.

# of vCPUs per node

8

8

Refer to the RAM recommendations described below to plan resources for different types of nodes.

RAM in GB per node

24

16

To prevent issues with low RAM, Mirantis recommends the following VM templates for a managed cluster with 50-200 nodes:

  • 16 vCPUs and 32 GB of RAM - manager node

  • 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of RAM - nodes where the StackLight server components run

Storage in GB per node

120

120

The listed amount of disk space must be available as a shared datastore of any type, for example, NFS or vSAN, mounted on all hosts of the vCenter cluster.

Operating system
RHEL 7.9 or 7.8 1
RHEL 8.4 2
CentOS 7.9 2
RHEL 7.9 or 7.8 1
RHEL 8.4 2
CentOS 7.9 2

For a management and managed cluster, a base OS VM template must be present in the VMware VM templates folder available to Container Cloud. For details about the template, see Prepare the OVF template.
RHEL license
(for RHEL deployments only)

RHEL licenses for Virtual Datacenters

RHEL licenses for Virtual Datacenters

This license type allows running unlimited guests inside one hypervisor. The amount of licenses is equal to the amount of hypervisors in vCenter Server, which will be used to host RHEL-based machines. Container Cloud will schedule machines according to scheduling rules applied to vCenter Server. Therefore, make sure that your RedHat Customer portal account has enough licenses for allowed hypervisors.

Docker version

-

-

For a management and managed cluster, Mirantis Container Runtime 20.10.6 is deployed by Container Cloud as a CRI.

VMware vSphere version

7.0, 6.7

7.0, 6.7

cloud-init version

19.4 for RHEL/CentOS 7.9, 20.3 for RHEL 8.4 TechPreview

19.4 for RHEL/CentOS 7.9, 20.3 for RHEL 8.4 TechPreview

The minimal cloud-init package version built for the Prepare the OVF template.

VMware Tools version

11.0.5

11.0.5

The minimal open-vm-tools package version built for the Prepare the OVF template.

Obligatory vSphere capabilities
DRS,
Shared datastore
DRS,
Shared datastore

A shared datastore must be mounted on all hosts of the vCenter cluster. Combined with Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), it ensures that the VMs are dynamically scheduled to the cluster hosts.

IP subnet size

/24

/24

Consider the supported VMware vSphere network objects and IPAM recommendations.

Minimal IP addresses distribution:

  • Management cluster:

    • 1 for the load balancer of Kubernetes API

    • 3 for manager nodes (one per node)

    • 6 for the Container Cloud services

    • 6 for StackLight

  • Managed cluster:

    • 1 for the load balancer of Kubernetes API

    • 3 for manager nodes

    • 2 for worker nodes

    • 6 for StackLight
1(1,2)

RHEL 7.8 deployment is possible with allowed access to the rhel-7-server-rpms repository provided by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7 x86_64. Verify that your RHEL license or activation key meets this requirement.

2(1,2,3,4)

CentOS 7.9 and RHEL 8.4 deployments are available as Technology Preview. Use this configuration for testing and evaluation purposes only. A Container Cloud cluster based on both RHEL and CentOS operating systems or on mixed RHEL versions is not supported.

See also

Deployment resources requirements