Hardware considerations for high availability¶

Hardware setup¶

The following are the standard hardware requirements:

• Provider networks: See the Overview -> Networking Option 1: Provider networks section of the Install Tutorials and Guides depending on your distribution.
• Self-service networks: See the Overview -> Networking Option 2: Self-service networks section of the Install Tutorials and Guides depending on your distribution.

OpenStack does not require a significant amount of resources and the following minimum requirements should support a proof-of-concept high availability environment with core services and several instances:

We recommended that the maximum latency between any two controller nodes is 2 milliseconds. Although the cluster software can be tuned to operate at higher latencies, some vendors insist on this value before agreeing to support the installation.

You can use the ping command to find the latency between two servers.

Virtualized hardware¶

For demonstrations and studying, you can set up a test environment on virtual machines (VMs). This has the following benefits:

• One physical server can support multiple nodes, each of which supports almost any number of network interfaces.
• You can take periodic snap shots throughout the installation process and roll back to a working configuration in the event of a problem.

However, running an OpenStack environment on VMs degrades the performance of your instances, particularly if your hypervisor or processor lacks support for hardware acceleration of nested VMs.