This tutorial relies on the capabilities of a single bare metal server and virtualization. This makes it easy to troubleshoot issues on the one hand but increases the requirements for a suitable machine on the other hand.
The following system specifications are recommended for the hypervisor node if you plan to run some workload beyond the scope of this tutorial:
- 3 TB storage (use NVMe or SSD) in
/home/ - 256 GB RAM
- 64 CPU cores
- 1 GBit/s network interface
- Internet access
- Virtualization capabilities
- Fedora 36 installed
- x86_64 system architecture
If this setup does not fit into your budget or if you are not able to find a machine with this specifications Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs) are used in this lab and might solve this problem. KVM is an open source virtualization technology which converts your Linux machine into a type-1 bare-metal hypervisor that allows you to run multiple virtual machines (VMs) or guest VMs. The KVM hypervisor automatically overcommits CPUs and memory. This means that more virtualized CPUs and memory can be allocated to virtual machines than there are physical resources on the system. This is possible because most processes do not access all of their allocated resources all the time. Just make sure that your system never really requests more resources than actually physically available.
This lab focuses on the infrastructure related parts of provisioning a cluster. Even though you can perform the steps mentioned here with little to no knowledge about networking, Linux or Kubernetes this approach is not recommend. Before starting, make yourself familiar with the following:
- Kubernetes concepts
- Linux
- Networking
- Routing
- Switching
- Network services
- Shell usage
- Networking
- Containers
- Virtual machines
Whenever you think it is unclear why or how a step in the lab is performed, create a new issue explaining where you have trouble so that the content necessary to fill the gap can be added.
The total time needed will vary but without any previous knowledge and if you can resist to simply copy-paste the commands without thinking, you will probably need a week to complete and understand the lab.
Next: Hypervisor