Hardware Requirements

This section describes the hardware requirements and server preparation for a StarlingX R4.0 bare metal Standard with Dedicated Storage deployment configuration.

Minimum hardware requirements

The recommended minimum hardware requirements for bare metal servers for various host types are:

Minimum Requirement

Controller Node

Storage Node

Worker Node

Number of servers

2

2-9

2-100

Minimum processor class

Dual-CPU Intel® Xeon® E5 26xx family (SandyBridge) 8 cores/socket

Minimum memory

64 GB

64 GB

32 GB

Primary disk

500 GB SSD or NVMe (see Configure NVMe Drive as Primary Disk)

120 GB (min. 10k RPM)

120 GB (min. 10k RPM)

Additional disks

None

  • 1 or more 500 GB (min. 10K RPM) for Ceph OSD

  • Recommended, but not required: 1 or more SSDs or NVMe drives for Ceph journals (min. 1024 MiB per OSD journal)

  • For OpenStack, recommend 1 or more 500 GB (min. 10K RPM) for VM ephemeral storage

Minimum network ports

  • Mgmt/Cluster: 1x10GE

  • OAM: 1x1GE

  • Mgmt/Cluster: 1x10GE

  • Mgmt/Cluster: 1x10GE

  • Data: 1 or more x 10GE

BIOS settings

  • Hyper-Threading technology enabled

  • Virtualization technology enabled

  • VT for directed I/O enabled

  • CPU power and performance policy set to performance

  • CPU C state control disabled

  • Plug & play BMC detection disabled

Prepare bare metal servers

Prior to starting the StarlingX installation, the bare metal servers must be in the following condition:

  • Physically installed

  • Cabled for power

  • Cabled for networking

    • Far-end switch ports should be properly configured to realize the networking shown in Figure 1.

  • All disks wiped

    • Ensures that servers will boot from either the network or USB storage (if present)

  • Powered off