Requirements

Management Plane Requirements

Disks

For proper functionality, the Management Plane relies on a performant underlying Kubernetes cluster. To achieve optimal performance, we recommend utilising an SSD (Solid State Drive). Please refer to https://etcd.io/docs/v3.4/op-guide/hardware/#disks for more details.

Operating Systems

SMCP is designed to run on the following Operating Systems.

Networking

Virtual IPs

SMCP uses virtual IPs to access the Management Cluster. We require 2 virtual IPs on the same L2 domain as the nodes in the management cluster.

Proxy

proxy=http://mycache.mydomain.com:3128

Firewall

Disable firewalld - or update firewall rules so that the required ports are open as specified in Network Port Configurations

System Configuration

Passwordless Sudo

Many operations require sudo access (for example, the installation of yum repos, docker etc.). Please ensure your hosts have passwordless sudo enabled.

Disable Swap

Disable Swap: Before starting the installation, you need to disable swap on your node. You can do this by running the following command with superuser privileges:

sudo swapoff -a

This command will deactivate all swap partitions.

Remove Swap Entry from /etc/fstab: Next, you should remove any references to swap partitions from the /etc/fstab file. Open the /etc/fstab file in a text editor, such as nano or vi, and delete the lines that reference swap partitions. Make sure to save the file after making these changes.

Reboot the System: To apply the changes and ensure that swap is completely disabled, reboot your node by running the following command:

sudo reboot

After the system reboots, it will no longer use swap space, and you can proceed with the node installation.

SSH Keys

SMCP relies on SSH to login to the various nodes of the management cluster, as well as, the user clusters, to install various components and manage them.

Please generate SSH keys and sync them across all nodes of the management cluster as well as all nodes that will run the user's workload clusters.

We recommend generating the keys on one node and then adding the public key to all other hosts in its ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub centos@test-3-1

Airctl

Airctl is the CLI based installer for SMCP, and is used to manage the management cluster and the user nodes. Airctl and its corresponding artifacts needs to be downloaded and installed on one of the nodes of the Management Cluster.

Downloading Artifacts

Platform9 publishes SMCP artifacts as secured HTTP endpoints. These endpoints can be accessed via curl or wget or any other command line utility to download the artifacts.

You can download all artifacts using the following download script:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platform9/support-locker/master/edge-stack/download.sh

chmod +x ./download.sh

Once you’ve downloaded the script you can then run the script with the following options:

./download.sh <secret-key> <release-version>

• secret-key: ask Platform9 Support for this key
• release-version: The latest release version is available on the Platform9 Docs Website: https://platform9.com/docs/PEC

For online mode, we can run the following command to download only few essential artifacts to start with:

% curl --user-agent "<secret>" https://pf9-airctl.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/<version>/index.txt | grep -e airctl -e nodelet.tar.gz  -e nodelet-deb.tar.gz -e install.sh | awk '{print "curl -sS --user-agent \"<secret>\" \"https://pf9-airctl.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/<version>/" $NF "\" -o <download directory>" $NF}' | bash

Once all artifacts are downloaded, install them using:

chmod +x ./install.sh

./install.sh <release-version>

This copies all artifacts under /opt/pf9/airctl.

For airgapped setups, please ensure all the nodes of management cluster and user workload cluster have the following Linux packages pre-installed depending on the operating system:

CentOS/ RHEL

container-selinux

curl

gzip

ipset-libs

iptables-services

ipvsadm

libcgroup-tools

net-snmp-agent-libs

net-snmp-libs

net-tools

Rocky Linux

container-selinux

curl

gzip

ipset-libs

iptables-services

ipvsadm

libnftnl

lm_sensors-libs

net-snmp-agent-libs

net-snmp-libs

net-tools

Ubuntu Linux

cgroup-tools

curl

gzip

ipvsadm

libcgroup1

libsnmp40

net-tools

socat

In addition, we require OpenSSL version 3.0.7 to be installed on Ubuntu 22.04

Download the pre-compiled package from the following location provided by Platform9 instead of the upstream apt repository

curl --user-agent <SECRET>  https://pf9-airctl.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/openssl-smcp-ubuntu/openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb --output openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb

Install it using the following commands

sudo dpkg -i openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb

cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d/

echo "/usr/local/ssl/lib64" > openssl-3.0.7.conf

ldconfig -v

sed -i 's/\(^PATH="[^"]*\)"/\1:\/usr\/local\/ssl\/bin"/' /etc/environment

source /etc/environment

ln -sf /usr/local/ssl/bin/openssl /usr/bin/openssl

Once downloaded, the directory contains a list of .tar or .tar.gz files, an index file, and a simple install.sh file. Visit the Artifacts page to learn more about the downloaded artifacts.