Pre-installation Information
Introduction
This article provides information on the Platform9 Edge Cloud (PEC) and an overview on how to install it in an On-Prem setting.
Terminology
KDU (Formerly called DU)
A Deployment Unit (DU) is a unit of deployment that typically represents a region for a given customer. You may also refer to this as the Platform9 Management Plane. The current version of DU runs as a virtual machine on a deployment host. Future versions of the product will include a containerized version of the same product, allowing for its deployment on Virtual machines in public or private clouds.
One of the important architectural goal behind this design is to allow for running clusters even when the management plane is not running. The current design allows for it, the details can be found in the Architecture overview section.
Management Station or Deployment Host (DH)
One of the key prerequisite is a place to install different utilities and the DU. A management station or deployment host assumes that responsibility. The deployment host is a machine where DU can run and also has the necessary connectivity from which users can access all the Kubernetes nodes. This host can be a small workstation like Intel (Next Unit of Computing) NUC, or even share the space with one or more Kubernetes Nodes in the diagram.
Node Prerequisites
Multi Node Deployments
Minimum
Compute: 4 vCPU
Memory: 8GB
Disk: 150GB
Recommended
Compute: 8vCPU
Memory: 16GB
Disk: 180GB
Single Node Deployments
Minimum
Compute: 8 vCPU
Memory: 16 GB
Disk: 150GB
Recommended
Compute: 12 vCPU
Memory: 16 GB
Disk: 180GB
OS Prerequisites
Centos 7.5 / 7.6 / 7.7 / 7.8 / 7.9
Redhat 8.6
Software
As mentioned earlier, the current version of Platform9 uses a Virtual Machine to host the DU/Management Plane, for that machine specifically we would need the few items
VIP Requirements
We generally need 2 VIPs in the same L2 domain as the management nodes to deploy the management stack.
- VIP 1: (required) This is the IP where you can access the management DU's UI. This is configured as
externalIpand/orexternalIpV6in airctl-config.yaml. - VIP 2: (optional; only used for multi master clusters) This is used to serve the management cluster’s API server. On multi-master clusters, this is configured as
masterIpand/ormasterIpV6in clusterSpec.yaml (pointed to by bootstrapCfgPath). For single-master clusters, it is simply the IP of the master node (no VIP). For multi-master, it becomes the VIP.
Proxy
If using a proxy in your environment, edit the /etc/yum/yum.conf file to add the proxy configuration as well as environment variable HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY
Install Libvirt
Here, we install libvirt, then start it and finally verify it is functioning using the commands below.
# Install Libvirtyum -y install libvirt qemu-kvm# Ensure Libvirt is runningsystemctl start libvirtd# make sure libvirt is working wellvirsh list --all# Add your user to the authentication of the libvirt.sudo usermod --append --groups libvirt $USER# Also give the qemu user access to your home directory where the state is keptchmod a+x /home/$USERPasswordless Sudo
Many operations require sudo access (for example, the installation of yum repos, docker etc.) Please ensure your hosts have passwordless sudo enabled.
SSH Keys
For the KDU running inside the Virtual Machine, Platform9 tooling injects an SSH key at the first boot. Please generate those keys. The same key can be used for communicating with different hosts as well.
Make sure the created SSH key is also added to different hosts as authorized_keys. Copy over the ssh public key into the other hosts and add to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Download Artifacts
Platform9 publishes PEC artifacts as secured HTTP endpoints. These endpoints can be accessed via curl or wget or any other command line utility to download the artifacts.
To downloading these artifacts, contact a Platform9 Support, Solutions Architect or Sales Team member. They will provide you with the "secret" that can be added to the "_user-agent_" value and the appropriate release version,
Download all artifacts: You can download all artifacts using the following download script:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platform9/support-locker/master/edge-stack/download.shchmod +x ./download.shOnce 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/pec-lts2-release
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 each node for management cluster has the following Linux packages pre-installed:
curlgzipnet-toolslibcgroup-toolsOnce 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.