System requirements

The system requirements for installing IBM Storage Fusion software.

The IBM Storage Fusion operators and your workloads run on OpenShift® Container Platform that in turn uses 64-bit Intel, AMD x86, Linux on IBM Z, or Power hardware architecture. For more information about Fusion data services on the different deployment platforms of IBM Storage Fusion, see IBM Storage Fusion Services support matrix.The following table lists the system requirements for IBM Storage Fusion software:
Note: Though there is no minimum number of nodes requirement, the following table provides data based on three control nodes and three compute nodes cluster. However, sizing changes based on the number of nodes for components with "Per node".

Fusion Data Foundation can be deployed on Infra or worker nodes, whereas all other IBM Storage Fusion services including Base must be deployed on worker nodes.

Component vCPUs Memory Storage
IBM Storage Fusion Base Request CPU: 4

Limit CPU: 10

 Request memory: 4 GiB

Limit memory: 13 GiB

 Overall storage is a minimum of 500 MB.
Fusion Data Foundation 4.15.x

Fusion Data Foundation 4.16 in IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.1
Internal mode (Local and dynamic)

Request CPU: 22+2*(total count of Object Storage Daemon )

Limit CPU: 26 (total count of Object Storage Daemon)

External mode

Request CPU: 6

Limit CPU: 5

For IBM Power Systems:
Internal mode
48 CPU (logical)
External mode
24 CPU (logical)
Internal mode (Local and dynamic)

Request memory: 56+5*(total count of Object Storage Daemon) GiB

Limit memory: 56+5*(total count of Object Storage Daemon) GiB

External mode

Request memory:16 GiB

Limit memory: 16 GiB

For IBM Power Systems:
Internal mode
192 GiB memory
External mode
48 GiB memory
 Minimum three storage Nodes

For more information about Fusion Data Foundation, see Important considerations when deploying Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation.

For IBM Power Systems:
Internal
3 storage devices, each with additional 500 GB of disk
Global Data Platform
Per node

Request CPU: 10% (total vCPU of the node)

Cluster

Request CPU: 3

Limit CPU: 12
Per node

Request memory: 10% (total memory of the node)

Cluster

Request memory: 13

Limit memory: 30

 For more information about IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage Access, see Hardware requirements for IBM Storage Scale Container Native Storage Access.
Backup & Restore hub

Request CPU: 5

Limit CPU: 30

Request memory: 17 GiB

Limit memory: 41 GiB

 200 GB Minimum
Backup & Restore spoke

Request CPU: 2

Limit CPU: 8

Request Memory: 2 GiB

Limit Memory 7 GiB

 10GiB
Data Cataloging

Request CPU: 14

Limit CPU: 77

Request memory: 29 GiB

Limit memory: 162 GiB

 500 GB Minimum

For more information about Data Cataloging, see Data Cataloging.
The following table lists the component versions:
Component Versions
On-premises VMware Version 7.0
On-premises IBM z/OS Container Extensions (IBM zCX) All the zCX hypervisor versions on which OpenShift Container Platform is supported.
Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform 2.8.0:

4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15

2.8.1:

4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16

Note: You can upgrade Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to the supported 4.15 version. However, you cannot enable Data Cataloging service in an upgraded IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.0 with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.15.
Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine (OKE) You can use OKE as an alternative for OpenShift Container Platform. The supported version of OKE is same as OpenShift Container Platform.
Storage Fusion Data Foundation 4.12, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16.x

Fresh installation of IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.1 only supports Fusion Data Foundation 4.16.

Note: For deployment platforms and supported services, see IBM Storage Fusion Services support matrix.
IBM Storage Scale
Note: IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.0 supports IBM Storage Scale 5.2.0.0. IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.1 supports IBM Storage Scale 5.2.0.1.
Remote mount of IBM Storage Scale storage:
  • IBM Storage Scale remote storage cluster release 5.1.3 or higher.
  • The IBM Storage Fusion cluster accesses the storage owned by an IBM Storage Scale storage cluster by using a remote mount.

    The IBM Storage Scale file system version of the owning storage cluster cannot be newer than version 33.00.

    For more information, see Software requirements.

    To determine the version of your IBM Storage Scale cluster, run the mmdiag --version command on the IBM Storage Scale cluster. To determine the version of your IBM Storage Scale file system, run the mmlsfs all -V command.

    For further information, including installation/upgrade instructions for the remote IBM Storage Scale cluster, see IBM Storage Scale documentation.
Backup & Restore
IBM Storage Fusion supports backup and recovery operations on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform environment on AMD64 with any storage provider that implemented the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver and meets the following prerequisites:
Note: Backup & Restore 2.8.1 is not supported on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.16.
  • The Container Storage Interface driver must be v1 or higher (no support for alpha or beta versions)
  • The Container Storage Interface driver must support Volume Snapshot and Restore.
  • StorageClass must be created with volumeBindingMode: Immediate (volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer is not supported) and allowVolumeExpansion: true.
  • PersistentVolume (PV) must be created with volumeMode: Filesystem (volumeMode: Block is not supported)
Note: It is also recommended that the VolumeSnapshotClass deletion policy is configured to delete snapshots after the corresponding VolumeSnapshotContent is deleted (deletionPolicy: Delete).
Note: For backups of PVCs provisioned on IBM Storage Scale, snapshots are be created only from independent fileset-based persistent volume claims (PVCs). PVCs that are based on lightweight directories and dependent file sets are not supported.