Provisioning of bare-metal nodes

For the initial deployment of the management plane and the control plane of OSISM, the nodes must be pre-provisioned with Ubuntu 22.04. Currently, only Ubuntu 22.04 is supported by OSISM.

Data plane nodes can be automatically provisioned after the initial deployment and do not need to be pre-provisioned.

It is recommended not to install the initial nodes of the management plane and the control plane manually. An ISO image is provided for this purpose which automatically provisions a node. The ISO images are available for download in the osism/node-image repository.

Automated Installation using Node Images

There are different variants of the ISO image. The variants differ in the disc layout.

The pre-build variants are described in the osism/node-image repository.

A good way to provision the nodes is to use virtual media mounts via the usually available Redfish functionality of the BMC of the servers used. In this way, the basic installation can be carried out without external dependencies such as adapting the switch configuration, DHCP, upstream connectivity, etc. In many cases, this simplifies the process, makes it more automation-friendly and avoids potential sources of error.

OSISM also provides a tool to generate node images specific for you needs.

This makes particular sense for the node-provisioning in the following situations:

• Make complex configurations like layer3 underlay
• Add your SSH keys to the image
• Configure a specific root password
• Change other characteristics of the setup
  • Templates
  • Partitioning
  • Packages
  • ...
• Develop new standard images

The procedures for building custom images are described in the osism/node-image repository.

Manual provisioning

If none of the provided variants is suitable, this section describes the manual installation with the help of the Ubuntu 22.04 live ISO image. The manual installation is possible without network connectivity.

• Download the latest ISO image for Ubuntu 22.04 from releases.ubuntu.com.
  • Use the ubuntu-22.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso image.
  • The version number may be different, always use the latest available version of 22.04 LTS.
• Choose English as language.
• Choose Install Ubuntu Server.
• Choose English as language (again).
• Choose your location (e.g. Germany).
• Choose en_US.UTF-8 as locale.
• Choose the keyboard layout from a list, use English (US).
• Choose and configure the primary network interface.
  • Depending on the environment, the network may not work at this point. Then select any interface and then select Do not configure the network at this time in the next step.
• Set the hostname.
  • The hostname is e.g. node and not a FQDN like node.systems.osism.xyz.
• Set osism as full name for the new user.
• Set osism as the username for the account.
  • The later used operator user dragon is created during the bootstrap and should not be created during the installation. Do not use dragon as username.
  • The account is only needed initially and can be deleted after completion of the bootstrap.
• Set a password for the account.
• Choose Manual as partitioning method and execute the partitioning according to company specifications
  • The use of a UEFI is recommended
  • The use of a RAID is recommended. We prefer the use of software RAIDs to make us less dependent on hardware. But there is nothing against using hardware RAIDs.
  • The use of a LVM2 is recommended. system is recommended as the name for the volume group.
  • Dedicated disks may be provided for /var/lib/docker on the controller nodes. In this case, do not use an LV for /var/lib/docker but the devices provided for it.
  • Do not configure devices that are not required for the operating system.
  • The use of own file systems for the following mountpoints is recommended. The size of the partitions/LVs is minimal. Depending on the node type, the partitions/LVs should be made larger.
    • / (10 GByte, logical volume root)
    • /home (2 GByte, logical volume home)
    • /tmp (5 GByte, logical volume tmp)
    • /var/lib/ceph (50 GByte, logical volume ceph) (optional for storage nodes)
    • /var/lib/docker (30 GByte, logical volume docker, do not set the nosuid flag on /var/lib/docker)
      • When using XFS as the file system for /var/lib/docker, note the following: Running on XFS without d_type support causes Docker to skip the attempt to use the overlay or overlay2 driver.
      • 100 GB should be used on a control node at the beginning.
      • /var/lib/docker must be extended later during operation depending on the node type. You do this in operation when you can see how many logs etc. are generated.
    • /var/log/audit (1 GByte, logical volume audit)
    • /var (10 GByte, logical volume var)
    • swap (8 GByte, logical volume swap)
• Choose No automatic updates.
• Choose OpenSSH server as software to install.
  • Do not install any other software component. Everything you need will be installed later by OSISM. In particular, it is not necessary to install a desktop environment.
• After completion, restart the system.