System requirements

Before you start cluster deployment, verify that your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements.

Hardware requirements

Although MKE 4k uses k0s as the underlying Kubernetes distribution, the hardware requirements for MKE 4k differ from k0s due to the higher resource requirements of various enterprise-grade components the software uses.

To ensure stability, optimal performance, and reliable upgrades, Mirantis performed extensive internal testing to determine the optimum hardware configuration for MKE 4k:

• vCPUs: 8 vCPUs per node
• RAM: 32 GB per node

To compare, the same testing showed repeated upgrade failures for MKE 3 systems with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM.

Software requirements

• Operating systems:
  • Ubuntu 20.04 Linux
  • Ubuntu 22.04 Linux
  • RHEL 8.10
  • Rocky Linux 9.4
• Architecture: amd64
• CNI: Calico

Load balancer requirements

The load balancer can be implemented in many different ways. For example, you can use HAProxy, NGINX, or the load balancer of your cloud provider.

To ensure the MKE 4k Dashboard functions properly, MKE 4k requires a TCP load balancer. This load balancer acts as a single point of contact to access the controllers. With the default MKE 4k configuration, the load balancer must allow and route traffic to each controller through the following ports:

You can configure the listen port of the Ingress Controller to be different from the default port 443. However, if you change the listen port, you must append the new port number to the external address in the configuration file. For example, if you set the listen port to be the same as the target port, 33001, the configuration should look as follows:

apiServer:
  externalAddress: "mke.example.com:33001"

The target port must match the HTTPS node port of the Ingress Controller, which is 33001 by default, but can be adjusted as needed. See the configuration details for nodePorts in the Ingress Controller configuration.