System Requirements for an Embedded Cluster Install

While the Turbine platform can be installed on a single node for testing, a 3+ node cluster is recommended for production environments to provide redundancy and high availability (HA). Any multiple node cluster must have an odd number of total nodes. In embedded HA deployments, stateful services (MongoDB, Postgres, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ) remain at 3 replicas even when you add more Kubernetes nodes. Additional nodes increase scheduling capacity for stateless pods, not stateful replicas.

This table details the recommended sizing and data per node:

This table illustrates the resource recommendations (per node) for a standalone mongo deployment. All of these values can be subtracted from the system requirements above when allocating resources for the remainder of the Turbine pods. For more information about deploying on an External MongoDB cluster, see Deploy Turbine with an External MongoDB ClusterDeploy Turbine with an External MongoDB Cluster.

This table illustrates the resources necessary for the remainder of Turbine if you are using external MongoDB resources:

All nodes need to stay below certain resource utilization thresholds to ensure that pods always have available resources to operate in. If any of the following thresholds are exceeded on a node, all pods on that node will be removed until the resource utilization is addressed:

Taking a snapshot requires enough free disk space for a compressed archive of the Swimlane database to be saved in ephemeral storage before it is uploaded to the snapshot destination. Free disk space on the cluster at /var/lib/kubelet should be greater than or equal to the size of the uncompressed database to ensure there is no disk pressure during the snapshot process.

The following operating systems have been tested by Swimlane for your node setup:

Limitations:

Use the following command to install:

sudo dnf -y install nfs-utils conntrack-tools socat git fio container-selinux tar zip unzip

For Rocky Linux 9.2, run the following command to change the file permissions:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local

For each node, ensure that you have: 

CPU architecture must be compatible with MongoDB, unless an external MongoDB solution is used. See the MongoDB Platform Support Matrix for more information.

Key requirements:

Pre-Installation Verification

Before installing, verify AVX support on each node:

Virtualized Environment — VM CPU Type Compatibility

If deploying in a virtualized environment, ensure the VM CPU type exposes AVX instructions to the guest OS. Use the table below to check compatibility:

Hypervisor-specific guidance:

For access to these optional services, ensure you have these things within the airgapped network:

A load balancer that supports hairpinning is REQUIRED for HA installations.

Here are some suggested load balancers and configurations that you can use:

Each node in the cluster needs to be reachable by the load balancer on these ports:

A load balancer is required for the Kubernetes API and the Turbine Platform Installer.

The Kubernetes API load balancer must be a Layer 4 load balancer.

The Turbine Platform Installer and the Turbine platform load balancer can be either a Layer 4 or Layer 7 load balancer.

Local storage of snapshots (see note below)

Amount of Turbine data and integrations

The directory /var/lib/kurl/ is the default location for installer temporary files but the path can be overridden at install time. The partition that path is on needs to have 20GB available during the install to ensure successful installation and can be removed after the installation has completed.

Use the IP or DNS record for the Kubernetes API load balancer to specify the load balancer address during the initial installation.

A DNS record should be created that points to the Turbine Platform Installer and Turbine platform load balancer. This will be the DNS address specified when you configure Turbine after the installation. Append that address with :8800 in order to access the Turbine Platform Installer UI.

If only one Layer 4 load balancer is used then a single DNS record can be created and used for both purposes.

Turbine installations on servers with tight Network Access Control (NAC) will need several exceptions made to properly install, license, and stage a Turbine deployment with the Turbine Platform Installer. See the tables below for the Outbound and Inbound exceptions.



The following ports are required externally to allow access to the Turbine platform components:

The following ports are required between the clusters nodes to allow cluster operation:

The following ports are required between the cluster nodes and the load balancer(s):

In addition to all ports listed above in the Between Cluster Nodes table, the following ports are required to be available and unused by other processes on each cluster node in order to install:

Swimlane recommends that any TPI installation has some amount of external monitoring set up and set to alert when any user-defined thresholds are met as to possible instances of your production instances going down. Different installation scenarios may call for different metrics to monitor for, so your implementation may vary. As a baseline, the following metrics are recommended:

There are several third-party monitoring solutions that you can use to monitor resource usage for a node. Any tool that you put into use should be installed externally to the cluster so as to not interfere with cluster operations and to be able to alert if a metric enters into a failing scenario. These products may require that their own agents or exporters be installed on the nodes in order to facilitate monitoring. Any agent or exporter should be tested against your cluster to validate that they do not interfere with Turbine operations or port requirements.