Hardware Requirements

This section describes the hardware requirements and server preparation for a StarlingX R5.0 bare metal Standard with Controller Storage deployment configuration.

Minimum hardware requirements

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

Minimum Requirement

Controller Node

Worker Node

Number of servers

2

2-10

Minimum processor class

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

Minimum memory

64 GB

32 GB

Primary disk

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

120 GB (Minimum 10k RPM)

Additional disks

  • 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 local ephemeral storage

Minimum network ports

  • Mgmt/Cluster: 1x10GE

  • OAM: 1x1GE

  • 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