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Contrail Insights General Requirements

As described in Contrail Insights Architecture, the Contrail Insights software installs onto two types of hosts. A Platform host executes the control plane services. Compute nodes execute the Contrail Insights Agent that analyzes metrics and evaluates policies.

Contrail Insights provides Ansible playbooks to install and uninstall the software on compute hosts and the Platform host. The Ansible playbooks can be executed from a separate host other than the Platform host and compute hosts.

The following requirements apply to installations of Contrail Insights in all environments (Contrail Insights Installation and Configuration for OpenStack, Contrail Insights Installation for NorthStar, Contrail Insights Installation for Kubernetes, and so on). See specific installation topics for additional requirements.

Hardware Requirements

The Platform host, on which Contrail Insights Platform is installed has the following requirements.

  • CPU: 16 cores (virtual or physical)

  • Memory: 64 GB

  • Storage: 300 GB (recommended)

Software Requirements

  • docker 17.03.1-ce, installed on the Platform host(s).

  • docker version 3.7.1, installed on the Platform host(s).

  • Ansible versions 2.3.0 and earlier than 2.8.0, installed on a host that has SSH access to Platform hosts and compute hosts to which Contrail Insights will be deployed.

  • httplib2 must be installed on the host where Ansible is executed.

Both Docker packages are installed by the Contrail Insights playbooks and are installed on the Platform host only.

Note:

Starting with Contrail Insights release 3.3.0, Python 3.6.5 is the minimum Python version required on all hosts where Agent gets installed.

Ansible can be executed from any host that can reach the Platform host and compute hosts through SSH. A supported version of Ansible may already be available in your environment. If not, Ansible can be installed on the Platform host, or a separate deployment host from which the playbooks are executed. On the host on which Ansible is executed, httplib2 must be installed (required by Ansible modules used in the Contrail Insights playbooks).

Network Requirements

IP connectivity:

  • One IP address for the Platform host.

  • Platform host must have IP connectivity to reach compute nodes.

  • Remote agents must have IP connectivity to reach management address of:

    • Network devices for SNMP polling.

    • Remote hosts for SNMP polling.

    • Remote hosts for Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) polling.

  • Platform host requires Internet connectivity during installation.

  • Dashboard client (in browser) must have IP connectivity to Platform host.

DNS:

  • Platform host must be able to resolve hostnames of compute nodes.

  • Compute nodes must be able to resolve hostname of Platform host.

  • Dashboard client (in browser) must be able to resolve hostname of Platform host.

TCP port requirements:

Users interact with the Dashboard client that runs in a Web browser. The Dashboard client communicates with control plane services over port 9000 on the Platform host.

Agent serves REST API on port 42595 on compute hosts. Controller must be able to open connections to the agent for configuration. Agent opens connections to controller and DataManager using port 9000. (A proxy routes API requests to the appropriate service.)

Within the backend management network, Contrail Insights components listen on the following ports:

  • Contrail Insights Platform serves REST API on port 7000.

  • OpenStack adapter serves REST API on port 7500.

  • DataManager serves REST API on port 8090.

  • Dashboard service listens on port 9000 for connections from browser.

The specific port numbers can be configured to suitable values to meet requirements of a given environment.

User Requirements

Agent Requirements

Contrail Insights Agent executes on each compute node. See Contrail Insights Agent Requirements for details.