Pre-requisites

This document describes the pre-requisites to deploy Self-Hosted version of Private Cloud Director.

Following table provides the recommended number of servers you should allocate to run your Self-Hosted Private Cloud Director Instance.

Management Cluster

As part of the installation process, the Self-Hosted version of Private Cloud Director creates a Kubernetes cluster using the physical servers that you use to deploy it on. We refer to this cluster as the management cluster. The Private Cloud Director management plane then runs as a set of Kubernetes pods and services on this management cluster.

Following is the recommended capacity for the management cluster, based on the projected scale of your Private Cloud Director deployment.

Hypervisors You Plan to Use	Minimum Management Cluster Capacity	Recommended Management Cluster Capacity
Small (<20 hosts)	3 servers, each with: 14 vCPUs, 28GB RAM and 250GB SSD	4 servers, each with: 16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM and 500GB SSD
Growth (<100 hosts)	4 servers, each with: 16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM and 500GB SSD	5 servers, each with: 16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD
Enterprise (>100 hosts)	5 servers, each with: 16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD 1 additional server for every 100 Hypervisors	6 servers, each with: 24 vCPUs, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD 1 additional server for every 50 Hypervisors

The above recommendation is for a single Management Plane region. For every extra region that needs to be deployed on the same Management Cluster, the capacity should be increased increased accordingly. It is recommended to have a separate management cluster in every geographical location, so as to avoid performance degration and single point of failure.

Server Configuration

Each physical server that you use to run as part of the management cluster should meet following requirements:

Operating System: Ubuntu 22.04

Swap config:

• Make sure that each server has swap disabled. You can run the following command to do this.

Bash

swapoff -a

The above change will not survive a reboot; hence it is recommended to update the /etc/fstab file and comment out the line has the entry for swap partition. e.g.

Bash

UUID=aabbcc /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
UUID=xxyyzz /home           ext4    defaults        	0       2
UUID=mswmsw /media/windows  ntfs    defaults				  0       0

#/dev/sdb1 none swap sw 0 0   <--- comment out the line

IPv6 support:

Ensure the below sysctl setting is set to 0, so that IPv6 support is enabled on the server.

Bash

sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6
# If currently set to 1, change it to 0 as below:
echo net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=0 >> /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p

Passwordless Sudo:

• Many operations require sudo access (for example, the installation of yum repos, docker etc.). Please ensure that your server has passwordless sudo enabled.

Kernel Panic Option

Update the server configuration section to include a step for setting kernel.panic=10

YAML

echo "kernel.panic=10" >> /etc/sysctl.conf && sysctl -p

SSH Keys:

• We rely on ssh to login to the management cluster hosts, and to install various components and manage them.

• Please generate ssh keys and sync them across all hosts of the management cluster.

• We recommend generating the key pair on one host and then adding the public key to all other hosts in their ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This will enable every host in the management cluster to ssh into every other host.

Bash

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@test-3

Package Updates:

• Install cgroup-tools :

Bash

apt-get update -y && apt-get install cgroup-tools -y

• Download and Update OpenSSL Version to 3.0.7 for Ubuntu 22.04:

Bash

export AGENT_KEY=<YOUR_USER_AGENT_KEY>
# Download the OpenSSL package
curl --user-agent "${AGENT_KEY}" https://pf9-airctl.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/openssl-smcp-ubuntu/openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb --output /tmp/openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb
# Verify the MD5 checksum
md5sum /tmp/openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb | grep 706caf || { echo "MD5 checksum does not match, exiting." && exit 1; }
# Install the OpenSSL package
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/openssl_3.0.7-1_amd64.deb || { echo "Failed to install OpenSSL, exiting." && exit 1; }
echo "/usr/local/ssl/lib64" | sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/openssl-3.0.7.conf
sudo ldconfig -v
# Create a symbolic link to the OpenSSL binary
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/ssl/bin/openssl /usr/bin/openssl
# Verify the OpenSSL version
openssl version | grep 3.0.7 || { echo "OpenSSL version does not match, exiting." && exit 1; }

• User Agent Key For Installation:*

You will need a specific Platform9 user agent key for installation of your self-hosted management plane. Your Platform9 sales engineer will share the key with you prior to the install.

Networking

You will need 2 virtual IPs that are on the same L2 domain as the hosts in the management cluster.

• VIP #1: This is the IP where you can access the Private Cloud Director management plane UI.

• VIP #2: This is used to serve the management Kubernetes cluster's API server.

Storage

For a production setup of Self-hosted Private Cloud Director, you will need a Kubernetes Container Strorage Interface (CSI) compatible storage for persisting the state of the management cluster. Read more about CSI and Kubernetes Storage here.