Prepare Host and Environment¶

This section describes how to prepare the physical host and virtual environment for a StarlingX r8.0 virtual All-in-one Simplex deployment configuration.

Physical host requirements and setup ¶

The following sections describe system requirements and host setup for a workstation hosting virtual machine(s) where StarlingX will be deployed.

Hardware requirements¶

The host system should have at least:

Processor: x86_64 only supported architecture with BIOS enabled hardware virtualization extensions
Cores: 8
Memory: 32GB RAM
Hard Disk: 500GB HDD
Network: One network adapter with active Internet connection

Software requirements¶

The host system should have at least:

A workstation computer with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit

All other required packages will be installed by scripts in the StarlingX tools repository.

Host setup¶

Set up the host with the following steps:

Update OS:
```
apt-get update
```

Clone the StarlingX tools repository:

apt-get install -y git
cd $HOME
git clone https://opendev.org/starlingx/tools.git

Install required packages:
```
cd $HOME/tools/deployment/libvirt/
bash install_packages.sh
apt install -y apparmor-profiles
apt-get install -y ufw
ufw disable
ufw status
```
Note

On Ubuntu 16.04, if apparmor-profile modules were installed as shown in the example above, you must reboot the server to fully install the apparmor-profile modules.
Get the latest StarlingX ISO from the StarlingX mirror. Alternately, you can get an older release ISO from here.

Prepare virtual environment and servers ¶

Note

The following commands for host, virtual environment setup, and host power-on use KVM / virsh for virtual machine and VM management technology. For an alternative virtualization environment, see: Install StarlingX in VirtualBox.

Prepare virtual environment.

Set up the virtual platform networks for virtual deployment:
```
bash setup_network.sh
```
Prepare virtual servers.

Create the XML definitions for the virtual servers required by this configuration option. This will create the XML virtual server definition for:
- simplex-controller-0
The following command will start/virtually power on:
- The ‘simplex-controller-0’ virtual server
- The X-based graphical virt-manager application
```
bash setup_configuration.sh -c simplex -i ./bootimage.iso
```
If there is no X-server present errors will occur and the X-based GUI for the virt-manager application will not start. The virt-manager GUI is not absolutely required and you can safely ignore errors and continue.