Pre-requisites

This document outlines the infrastructure prerequisites for setting up your private cloud. If you are looking to deploy the Self-Hosted version, please follow the Pre-requisites first.

Hypervisor Host Prerequisites

Each physical server or host that you will use as a hypervisor with Private Cloud Director must meet the following requirements:

If you plan to only use non-ephemeral (block) storage for your virtual machines, having local storage of 100 GB at per hypervisor server level should be sufficient.
  • sudo access enabled for the Administrator to log into the server and install the Platform9 agent
  • Server hostname should contain at least one non-numeric character
  • Make sure that the content under /opt/pf9 is not shared across hosts. Either make this a local directory, or if using shared storage, ensure that this path mounts to a unique shared storage file share or volume that is not shared across any other hosts in your setup.
  • When using the SaaS-hosted deployment model, outbound connectivity (port 443) must be enabled on each server so that the Platform9 agent can connect to the Private Cloud Director SaaS management plane.
  • In the case of a multi-domain environment, host onboarding should be done by the Administrator user in the default domain and not the secondary domains.
  • If planning to use VM Live Migration feature, follow the Live Migration Prerequisites
  • If planning to use the Virtual Machine High Availability (VM HA) feature, follow the VM HA Prerequisites.
  • If you plan to use the Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR) feature, follow the DRR Pre-requisites

Operating System Version Compatibility

Private Cloud Director supports both Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. However, when running a mixed environment with both versions, be aware of the following limitations:

VM Migration Between Ubuntu Versions

Live migration of virtual machines between Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 hosts has known limitations:

  • Initial VM migration from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 typically succeeds.
  • Subsequent migrations back to Ubuntu 22.04 may fail.
  • Multiple round-trip migrations between versions are not supported.

Rolling Cluster Upgrades

When performing a rolling upgrade from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04:

  • Disable VM High Availability (VM HA) before starting the upgrade.
  • Disable Dynamic Resource Rebalancing (DRR) before starting the upgrade.
  • Drain each host before upgrading it to Ubuntu 24.04.
  • Complete all host upgrades before re-enabling VM HA and DRR This ensures workload stability during the upgrade process and prevents migration failures.

Storage Prerequisites

Private Cloud Director supports a wide variety of enterprise storage solutions. Verify you have access to the administrative console of your storage solution and can look up the required configuration information from your admin console.

  • Read more in the Storage Overview article about types of storage supported by Private Cloud Director.
  • For block storage, see the list of supported block storage drivers
  • Private Cloud Director expects each hypervisor that connects to iSCSI storage must present one unique iSCSI Qualified Name (IQN). Duplicate IQN can exist across hypervisor hosts when multiple hosts boot with an identical IQN, often because their OS image was cloned. Please refer to the knowledge base article to address duplicate IQNs.

Also see latest compatibility matrix of Cinder storage drivers and devices as maintained by the OpenStack project.

Using Ephemeral Local Storage

If you plan to use Ephemeral Local Storage for VM root disk, sufficient local disk space is required at per hypervisor host level to store virtual machine files. The recommended minimum storage per hypervisor host in this case is:

  • 250GB of local disk space
  • Used for operating systems, Private Cloud Director service components, virtual machine root disks, and log files.

Using Ephemeral Shared Storage or Volume Based Storage

If you plan to use Ephemeral Shared Storage or Block Storage Volumes for VM root disk, then per hypervisor host local disk requirements will be lower:

  • 100GB of local disk space
  • Used for operating system, Private Cloud Director service components, and log files.

Configure Swap

We recommend that you configure swap memory on all hosts that you add to your Private Cloud Director setup, to enhance system performance and to effectively manage memory-intensive VM workloads. Follow the steps in Configure Swap to configure your swap memory and the swappiness value for your host.

Networking Prerequisites

Read Overview & Architecture for a detailed understanding of networking in Private Cloud Director.

All hypervisor hosts should have a minimum of one network interface, and ideally four network interfaces to enable redundancy across network interface failure.

Use of bonded network interfaces is recommended to ensure high availability in case of a physical network interface failure.

A typical configuration would look like:

  • bond0 mapped to two network adapters: eth0 and eth1
  • bond1 mapped to two network adapters: eth2 and eth3

Private Cloud Director allows you to designate separate network interfaces for the following types of traffic:

  • Management network
  • Image library I/O network
  • VM console network
  • Virtual network tunnels

Outbound Connectivity Requirements

You would need to configure outbound access on port 443 from your hosts for the below domain names to ensure they can be onboarded to the Private Cloud Director management plane.

  1. Private Cloud Director management plane url is accessed over port 443.
  2. For pcdctl CLI download on hosts, https://pcdctl.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pcdctl-setup
  3. APT sources list for installing packages on the Ubuntu host using pcdctl prep-node :
    1. http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
    2. http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
    3. http://ubuntu-cloud.archive.canonical.com/ubuntu
    4. http://nova.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
    5. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OpenStack/CloudArchive

Connectivity via http(s) proxy server

When outbound connectivity needs to be routed via a proxy server, ensure that the /etc/environment file has the http_proxy, https_proxy and no_proxy variables defined as follows:

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The format of a typical proxy server URL is [<protocol>][<username>:<password>@]<host>:<port> .

Also, the no_proxy variable should include IP addresses for which the traffic should not be routed via the proxy, e.g. other servers that would be set up as Hypervisor, Image Library or Storage roles.

Additionally, ensure that apt uses the proxy server to fetch packages. This can be configured by updating the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/proxy.conf file with the following entries

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VNC Console Prerequisites

The VNC console service is added to all hypervisor hosts as part of configuration of hypervisor role. This allows you to access the VMs on the host from your web browser. The following prerequisites must be met for this feature to work

  • Ensure that the port 6080 is open on each host.
  • Ensure that you are on the same network as the host.
  • To access the console using a public or floating IP address, or a domain name, configure the corresponding option in the cluster blueprint. Ensure that the necessary routing and DNS resolution are in place for the domain name or floating IP. This setting is applied to all hypervisor hosts in the region.

Image Library Prerequisites

The Image Library service manages virtual machine images in the Private Cloud Director environment. To enable its proper operation, the following prerequisites must be met:

  • The Image Library service runs on port 9494. Ensure this port is open to allow image operations, specially image uploads, edit or delete operations from web browsers and CLI clients.

  • Using shared storage for the image library service is required to create a highly available image library setup.
  • Image uploads and deletes using the CLI require the use of the Image Library Admin Endpoint, and the client machine being used to upload the image must have network reachability to the IP address of the image library host that is serving as the admin endpoint.

Browser Connectivity

The host that you've assigned the image library role (the image library host) must be accessible via a web browser from the machines your users will use to access Private Cloud Director UI . This requirement is necessary for:

  • Uploading images through the Private Cloud Director UI.
  • Verifying and accepting image library self-signed certificates.

Self-Signed Certificates

The Private Cloud Director image library service uses self-signed certificates today to secure the communication for image uploads. Since browsers and CLI tools only trust publicly verified certificates, users must manually accept the self-signed certificate before they can upload any images to the image library service.

To accept the self-signed certificate:

  • Navigate to the image library endpoint in a browser.

    • Click Access & Security Menu -> API Access -> and look for glance-cluster.

  • Accept the insecure certificate when prompted.

Load Balancer As a Service (LBaaS) Prerequisites

Follow the Load balancer as a service Prerequisites if you plan to use the Private Cloud Director built-in LBaaS component for your applications.

Kubernetes Pre-requisites

Read Kubernetes Pre-requisites for setting up a Kubernetes cluster in Private Cloud Director

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  Last updated on Oct 22, 2025
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Configure Swap
On This Page
Pre-requisitesHypervisor Host PrerequisitesOperating System Version CompatibilityStorage PrerequisitesUsing Ephemeral Local StorageUsing Ephemeral Shared Storage or Volume Based StorageConfigure SwapNetworking PrerequisitesOutbound Connectivity RequirementsConnectivity via http(s) proxy serverImage Library PrerequisitesBrowser ConnectivitySelf-Signed CertificatesLoad Balancer As a Service (LBaaS) PrerequisitesKubernetes Pre-requisites