Chapter 3. Supported infrastructure and platforms

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage supports deployment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployed with Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (Full Stack Automation) and User Provisioned Infrastructure (Pre Existing Infrastructure).

  • Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI)

    With full stack automation, the installer controls all areas of the installation including infrastructure provisioning with an opinionated best practices deployment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

  • User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI))

    With pre-existing infrastructure deployments, administrators are responsible for creating and managing their own infrastructure allowing greater customization and operational flexibility.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage supports deployment on the following infrastructures:

Table 3.1. Minimum infrastructure requirements

InfrastructureDeployment typeMinimum requirements

Amazon Web Services

IPI, UPI

  • Amazon EC2 with

    • an instance type m5.4xlarge
    • i3en instance type i3en.2xlarge (Technology preview)

See Creating OpenShift Container Storage cluster on Amazon EC2 for more details.

VMware

UPI

vSphere 6.7 Update 2 and higher with vSAN or VMFS datastore.

See VMware vSphere infrastructure requirements for details.

Bare Metal

UPI

Storage type must be SSD (NVMe/SATA/SAS)

(Technology preview)

3.1. Node requirements

The requirements mentioned in the section apply to pre-existing infrastructure deployments only and are required for exclusive use by Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage.

A minimum of 3 nodes are required for deployment with at least one Object Storage Daemon (OSD) and one Monitor daemon (MON) on each node.

Table 3.2. Minimum requirements for each starting node

ComponentsRequirements

CPU

16

Note: 8 CPUs for Amazon EC2 i3en which is currently a technology preview feature.

Memory

64  GB

Disk

  • For dynamic storage deployments,

    • 1 disk of size 0.5 TiB or 2 TiB or 4 TiB storage

  • For Local Storage deployment,

    • any disk size of 4 TiB or lesser can be used.
    • disk partitioning is not supported.
    • maintain uniform disk sizes across nodes for storage disks.

MON

10 GiB storage per MON on all the storage nodes.

  • MON will use 10 GiB storage space under /var/lib/rook for local storage deployments.
  • In case a node with MON fails and the MON failover to a new node, 10 GiB space will then be consumed on the new node as well.

Note: At a time only 3 nodes require the storage space.

Note
  • In case you plan to run any other workload on a storage node, you must add additional resources (CPU/Memory/Space).

  • In this section, 1 CPU Unit maps to the Kubernetes concept of 1 CPU unit. For more information, see CPU units.

    • 1 unit of CPU is equivalent to 1 core for non-hyperthreaded CPUs.
    • 2 units of CPU are equivalent to 1 core for hyperthreaded CPUs.

    • OpenShift Container Storage core-based subscriptions always come in pairs (2 cores).

      Example: For a 3 node cluster, a minimum of 3 x 16 = 48 units of CPU are required. 48 units of CPU are equivalent to 24 cores which is equivalent to 12 quantity of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage (2 core) subscriptions.

3.2. Platform requirements

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage is compatible only with the latest Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform versions.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.3, it is recommended to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3.2 and higher for flexibility in deployment.

For more information, see Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform interoperability matrix.

Important

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform must not be installed or running with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) mode enabled.

Nodes that run only storage workloads require a subscription for Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage.

Nodes that run other workloads in addition to storage workloads require both Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions.