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Hardware

There are a couple of considerations when choosing your hardware or virtual "hardware" for use as Kubernetes nodes.

  • MicroK8s requires at least 3 nodes to work in HA mode, so we'll start with 3 VMs
  • While MicroK8s is quite lightweight, by the time you start adding the storage capability you will need a reasonable amount of memory. Recommended minimum spec for this guide is 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM. More is obviously better.
  • If using Ceph as a storage backend, each VM will need two block devices (disks). One should be formatted and used as a normal OS device, and the other should be left untouched so it can be claimed by Ceph. The OS disk will also contain cached container images so could get quite large. I've allowed 16GB for the OS disk and Ceph requires a minimum of 10GB for its disk.
  • If running in VirtualBox, place all VMs either in the same NAT network, or bridged to the host network. Ideally have static IPs.
  • If you are running on bare metal, make sure the machines are on the same network, or at least on networks that can talk to each other.