Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Gluster Storage

Chapter 2. System Requirements

This chapter outlines the minimum hardware and software requirements to install Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administration.

Important

Ensure that all the requirements are met before the installation starts. Missing requirements can result in Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administration environment not functioning as expected.

The Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administration environment requires:

  • One machine to act as the management server
  • One or more machines to act as storage servers. At least three machines are required to support replicated volumes
  • One or more machines to be used as clients to access the Web Administration interface

2.1. Requirements for Web Administration Server System

On the system to be designated as the Web Administration server, verify that these recommended hardware and software requirements are met.

2.1.1. Hardware Requirements

The following are the different hardware requirements based on different cluster configurations:

2.1.1.1. Small Cluster Configuration

  • Number of nodes: upto 8 nodes
  • Number of volumes: upto 6-8 volumes per cluster
  • Number of bricks per node for replicated volumes: upto 2-3 bricks
  • Number of bricks per node for Erasure Coded volumes: upto 12-36 bricks

Recommended Requirements

  • 4 vCPUs
  • 4 GB of available system RAM
  • One Network Interface Card (NIC) with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps

Additional Storage Devices

For hosting etcd data directory:

  • Storage disk size: 20 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/etcd

For hosting time-series data from Graphite, Carbon, and Whisper applications:

  • Storage disk size: 200 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/carbon
Note

For more information on how to prepare and mount the additional disks, see the Creating a Partition and Mounting a File System sections in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Storage Administration Guide.

2.1.1.2. Medium Cluster Configuration

  • Number of nodes: 9-16 nodes
  • Number of volumes: upto 6-8 volumes per cluster
  • Number of bricks per node for replicated volumes: upto 2-3 bricks
  • Number of bricks per node for Erasure Coded volumes: upto 12-36 bricks

Recommended Requirements

  • 4 vCPUs
  • 6 GB of available system RAM
  • One Network Interface Card (NIC) with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps

Additional Storage Devices

For hosting etcd data directory:

  • Storage disk size: 20 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/etcd

For hosting time-series data from Graphite, Carbon, and Whisper applications:

  • Storage disk size: 350 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/carbon

2.1.1.3. Large Cluster Configuration

  • Number of nodes: 17-24 nodes
  • Number of volumes: upto 6-8 volumes per cluster
  • Number of bricks per node for replicated volumes: upto 2-3 bricks
  • Number of bricks per node for Erasure Coded volumes: upto 12-36 bricks

Recommended Requirements

  • 6 vCPUs
  • 6 GB of available system RAM
  • One Network Interface Card (NIC) with bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps

Additional Storage Devices

For hosting etcd data directory:

  • Storage disk size: 20 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/etcd

For hosting time-series data from Graphite, Carbon, and Whisper applications:

  • Storage disk size: 500 GB per cluster
  • Filesystem format: XFS
  • Mounting directory: /var/lib/carbon

2.1.2. Software Requirements

Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administration is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 or later 64-bit version.

Table 2.1. Software Requirements

SoftwareName and Version

Operating System

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 or later

2.2. Requirements for Red Hat Gluster Storage Nodes

Ensure the following requirements are met on the Red Hat Gluster Storage nodes:

  1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 or later.
  2. Red Hat Gluster Storage servers updated to the latest Red Hat Gluster Storage version 3.4 or greater. For detailed instructions on the upgrade process, see the Upgrading Red Hat Storage section in the Red Hat Gluster Storage Installation Guide.

  3. Minimum hardware requirements

    Note

    For more information, see the knowledge base article on Red Hat Gluster Storage Hardware Compatibility.

  4. Network Time Protocol (NTP) setup
  5. Firewall access to ports

For detailed information on prerequisites and setting up Red Hat Gluster Storage server, see the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.4.0 Installation Guide.

2.3. Requirements for the Client System

The Red Hat Gluster Storage Web Administration environment can be accessed by a client machine with the following web browser compatibility:

Table 2.2. Web Browser Compatibility

SoftwareName and Version

Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox 38.7.0 or later

Web Browser

Google Chrome 46 or later

2.4. Firewall Configuration

Automated Firewall Setup

In this version of Red Hat Gluster Web Administration, firewall configuration is automated by Ansible automation. The tendrl-ansible installer configures the firewall during Web Administration installation as the variable *configure_firewalld_for_tendrl* is set to True by default. This automation opens all the required ports for the Web Administration environment.

To automatically configure the firewall, follow the Web Administration installation process. See the Web Administration installation section in the Quick Start Guide for details.

Note

For tendrl-ansible to automate firewall setup, ensure the firewalld service is configured and enabled. For instructions, see Configuring Firewalld section in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security guide.

Manual Firewall Setup

To manually configure firewall for Web Administration services:

  1. Open the required ports before continuing the installation process

  2. Set the variable configure_firewalld_for_tendrl to False in the [all:vars] section of the inventory file which will be applied to both the groups: tendrl_server and gluster_servers. See sample variables described in Sample Inventory Variables at the end of 3.3 Web Administration Installation procedure of this guide.

    Note

    The inventory file is created as part of the Web Administration Ansible installation process.

  3. Follow 3.3 Web Administration Installation procedure of this guide.

The list of the ports and the port numbers are given in the table below:

Table 2.3. Web Administration Port Numbers

TCP Port NumbersUsage

2379

For etcd

2003

For Graphite

80 or 443

For tendrl http or https

8789

For tendrl-monitoring-integration

NOTE:

  • If you are updating to Web Administration 3.4 Update 2 or higher from previous versions, you no longer need to open TCP port 3000 on the Web Administration server.
  • If you are updating to Web Administration 3.4 Update 3 or higher from previous versions, you no longer need to open TCP port 10080 on the Web Administration server. Access to Graphite-web TCP port 10080 is unencrypted, you can open it if required.

To use Firewalld to open a particular port, run: 

# firewall-cmd --zone=zone_name --add-port=5667/tcp
# firewall-cmd --zone=zone_name --add-port=5667/tcp --permanent

To use iptables to open a particular port, run: 

# iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5667 -j ACCEPT
# service iptables save
Note

To be able to execute the iptables commands successfully, ensure the iptables-services package is installed. To install the iptables-services package, run yum install iptables-services.