Hardware and software requirements

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The following information provides a consolidated view of the hardware and software requirements for your IBM® Power® Virtualization Center version 2.3.3 environment.

It is recommended that the software and firmware is at the latest levels.
Notes:
  • Accounts that are used with PowerVC must be configured to use the Bash shell.
  • Make sure that the latest fixes are applied to the version of RSCT that is installed.
  • Support for software-defined networking is withdrawn.

Hosts

Table 1. Hardware and operating system requirements for PowerVC hosts.
Host type Supported hardware Supported operating systems
PowerVC management server

ppc64le and x86_64

For POWER8, POWER9, Power10, and Power11 - RHEL 8.10, RHEL9.6,

For x86_64 - RHEL 8.10 and RHEL9.6

Make sure that you install the following RHEL editions.
  • RHEL 8.10 and 9.6 - Server edition
  • RHEL 8.10 and 9.6 - Server with GUI edition
Notes:
  • All PowerVC nodes must have the same configurations - operating systems, CPU, memory, and so on.
  • Support for PowerVC installation on ppc64BE architecture is being withdrawn.
  • The EUS version for supported RHEL version is also included in the support.
  • Migration from SLES operating system to RHEL operating system and PowerVC Appliance is supported.
Managed hosts
IBM POWER8 or later processor classes.
  • Includes all form factors, such as chassis, rack, blade, and Power Flex.
  • All other PowerVC requirements apply, including storage, networking, guests, and so on.
  • Managed hosts must have a minimum of 4 cores and 8 GB of memory.
For more information about the supported guest operating system levels for deployed virtual machines, see Guest operating system support.
Notes:
  • You can manage an HMC host that has a shared memory pool. However, PowerVC does not support deploying or importing a virtual machine that uses shared memory.
  • You can manage a host that is part of Power Enterprise Pool 2.0. PowerVC does not support deploying, migrating, resizing, or remote restart operations for virtual machines with dedicated processors on these hosts. However, you can perform rest of the virtual machine lifecycle operations. Later when you manage the host through a different HMC, the host continues to have the Power Enterprise Pool 2.0 property enabled.
The following information describes the minimum and recommended resources that are required for PowerVC virtual machines. In the table, the meaning of the processor capacity column depends on the type of host that is being used as the PowerVC management server.
  • If the PowerVC management server is PowerVM®, the processor capacity refers to either the number of processing units of entitled capacity or the number of dedicated processors.
  • If the PowerVC management server is x86, the processor capacity refers to the number of physical cores.
Table 2. Minimum space and processor requirements for PowerVC management server - Up to 5 hosts, 2 storage providers, and 2 fabrics
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is higher) Up to 500 501-1000 1001-2000 2001-3000 3001-6000
Processor capacity 2 4 8 8 12
Virtual CPUs1 2 4 8 8 12
Memory (GB) 32 35 40 45 55
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
Disk used (GB) 100 120 140 160 180
CPU (MHz) x86: 2000ppc64le: 2500        
  1. These can be shared or dedicated.
  2. In a case where monitoring is enabled, ensure that sufficient memory and swap space are available along with proportionate changes for other resources as well.
Table 3. Minimum space and processor requirements for PowerVC management server - More than 5 hosts2, 2 storage providers, and 2 fabrics
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is higher Up to 500 501-1000 1001-2000 2001-3000 3001-6000 6001-10000
Processor capacity 2 4 8 8 12 12
Virtual CPUs1 2 4 8 8 12 12
Memory (GB) 50 60 75 80 85 100
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
Disk used (GB) 100 120 140 160 180 200
CPU (MHz) x86: 2000ppc64le: 2500          
  1. These can be shared or dedicated.
  2. For more information about the performance and scale considerations, see Planning for performance.
  
Note: For larger environments or to minimize the "noisy neighbor" effect, you must consider by using dedicated processors.
PowerVC has the following minimum space requirements:
  • /tmp - 5 GiB
  • /usr - 5 GiB
  • /opt - 15 GiB
  • /srv - 8 GB
  • /var - 10 GB
If /var/log/ is used as a separate partition, you must assign a minimum of 5 GB memory.
It is recommended that 20% of the disk space is assigned to /var.
Note: The values that are given for space requirements might differ because the capacity of the log archive generated by the powervc-diag command depends on the following parameters:
  • Number of HMC or NovaLink managed hosts
  • Duration of PowerVC run time
  • Capacity of each log file that powervc-diag collects

OpenStack release

PowerVC version 2.3.3 is built on OpenStack Caracal release.

PowerVC backup node OS support

Both PowerVC controller node and backup node must have the same OS version. For supported OS version details, see Hosts.

Guest operating system support

PowerVC supports all guest operating systems that are supported on respective Power System platforms. For more information about the guest operating systems that are supported on Power Systems, see the following topics:

Hardware Management Console

Table 4. HMC requirements
Item Requirement
Software level
PowerVC supports the following HMC releases:
  • V10.2.1030
  • V10.2.1040
  • V10.3.1050
  • V10.3.1051
  • V10.3.1060
  • V10.3.1061
  • V11.1.1110
  • V10.3.1062
  • V10.3.1063
Note: For supported HMC hardware levels, see Recommended Fixes - HMC Code Upgrades.
Concurrent virtual machine deployment and volume operations limit on HMC host
It is recommended to limit the total number of attach and detach operations to a maximum of 200 per host during concurrent virtual machine deployments and volume attach or detach operations on the HMC host. For a single virtual machine operations that are running on the HMC host, you can deploy the virtual machine with up to 200 volumes or limit the total number of attach or detach operations on the existing virtual machine to 200. For concurrent virtual machine operations that are running on the HMC host, limit the total number of attach and detach operations across virtual machines to 200. For example, you can perform four concurrent virtual machine operations with each virtual machine operation handling up to 50 volumes.

PowerVM NovaLink

NovaLink version 2.3.3 is supported on RHEL 8.10 and RHEL 9.6.
Note: For RHEL 9.x, make sure that the CRB repo is enabled.
For further details, see the NovaLink hardware and software requirements page.
The amount of memory that is needed by one NovaLink partition depends on how many virtual machines it is going to host:
Table 5. Amount of memory needed for one NovaLink partition
Number of virtual machines Up to 250 251-500 More than 500
RHEL 8.10 and RHEL 9.6 - Memory needed in a standard environment (GB) 8 14 18

Virtual I/O Server

Notes:
  • PowerVC does not install or configure third-party software on the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS). Any third-party software that you want to use for VIOS resources must be installed and configured on the VIOS before you manage it with PowerVC.
  • A minimum of 6 GB memory is required for VIOS 3.1.x and 4.1.x.

For VIOS sizing requirements when you use SR-IOV, see IBM PowerVM Best Practices.

Table 6. Supported virtualization platforms.
Platform Requirement
Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)
  • Version 3.1.3
  • Version 3.1.4
  • Version 4.1.0
  • Version 4.1.1
  • Version 4.1.1.10 with IJ55253 VIOS ifix
  • Version 4.1.2.0

Network

Table 7. Supported network hardware and software
Item Requirement
Network switches PowerVC does not manage network switches, but supports network configurations that use VLAN-capable switches.
Virtual networks Supports Shared Ethernet adapters for virtual machine networking.

Supports SR-IOV based vNICs on PowerVM.

IPv6 IPv6 is supported for the AIX 7.2 and 7.3 Guest OS only.

PowerVC can be installed on a system with IPv4 stack. PowerVC uses the default network interface, eth0. To use a different network interface, set the HOST_INTERFACE environment variable before you run the install script. Otherwise, the installer auto-selects eth0 and uses whichever stack is set up for that interface. If the connectivity exists, the hosts and storage of either type can be registered and managed with PowerVC. That is, PowerVC can communicate with hosts and storage over IPv4 addresses.

Notes:
  • PowerVC version 2.2.1 does not support IPv6 on the management node.
  • Make sure that the management system has DNS properly configured so that the hostname and management IP are resolvable. You can check /etc/resolv.conf file whether correct DNS server information is provided and it is functional. If the hostname resolution does not happen, you can resolve it locally by mentioning the hostname and IP mapping in the /etc/hosts file:
    x.x.x.x hostname short_hostname
Table 8. Types of networking supported on PowerVC
IPv4 Support
Management Server Virtual machine deployed by PowerVC
Yes Yes

Fabrics

PowerVC supports up to 25 fabrics.
Table 9. Supported fabric drivers
Supported Driver Documentation
Brocade Brocade zone driver system requirements
Virtual fabric support is included.
Note: Brocade zone OpenStack driver for Wallaby release is supported for PowerVC.
Cisco Cisco Fibre Channel Zone Driver

VSAN support is included.
Pluggable A pluggable fabric is an OpenStack supported fabric. Any fabric that is supported by an OpenStack driver can be registered with PowerVC, but the level of functions that it has within PowerVC depends on the driver. See Planning for storage for details.
Note: PowerVC supports calling the pluggable driver function, but not the driver itself. Issues that are traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device are referred to the device vendor.

Storage drivers

Some storage drivers support different devices based on the OpenStack release.

Table 10. Supported storage drivers
Supported Driver   Documentation
IBM Storwize® family

IBM SVC

  IBM Storwize family and SVC volume driver

IBM Storwize family overview

PowerVC 2.3.3 supports Storwize firmware level 8.7 and 9.1.x.
Note: Bulk volume operations, such as create or attach operations involving more than 100 volumes concurrently on Storwize firmware version 9.1.x, can result in longer completion time.

IBM Flash System v9000 Overview

For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
Hitachi   Enterprise Hitachi Block Storage Driver (HBSD) 14.0.0

Supported devices are listed in the Hitachi Block Storage Driver for OpenStack v 14.0.0 Release Notes.
IBM System Storage DS8000®   IBM Storage volume driver

For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
PowerMAX (VMAX)  

Dell EMC VMAX iSCSI and FC drivers

Unisphere 10.1.0 is supported for PowerMAX, which is firmware version 6079.

Unisphere 9.2 is no longer supported by PowerVC 2.3.3. New PowerMAX storage by using Unisphere 9.2.X is now blocked. If the storage is already registered, and PowerVC is upgraded to 2.3.3, then it is highly recommended that you must upgrade to Unisphere 10.1.X.
Pure Storage   For more information on supported models, see Pure Storage iSCSI and Fibre Channel volume drivers
HPE 3PAR   For more details on supported models, see HPE 3PAR for OpenStack Cinder.
Pluggable   A pluggable storage device is an OpenStack supported storage device. Any storage device that is supported by an OpenStack driver can be registered with PowerVC, but the level of functions that it has within PowerVC depends on the driver. See Planning for storage for details.
Note: PowerVC supports calling the pluggable driver function, but not the driver itself. Issues that are traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device are referred to the device vendor.
Note: For information about storage support on IBM i, refer to the IBM i POWER® External Storage Support Matrix Summary.

Security

Table 11. Supported security software
Item Requirement More information
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server (optional) OpenLDAP 2.0 or later OpenLDAP
Microsoft Active Directory 2016 or later Active Directory Domain Services
IBM Security Directory Suite 8.0.1 or later IBM Security Directory Suite
Support policy for MariaDB and MongoDB packages in PowerVC

IBM PowerVC includes or configures specific versions of MariaDB and MongoDB packages, either by directly shipping them or by pulling in the versions provided by the underlying operating system distribution. IBM validates the versions of MariaDB and MongoDB packages to ensure compatibility and functional reliability within the PowerVC environment.

The MariaDB and MongoDB database packages are considered as a part of the packages that are managed by PowerVC and are tested for interoperability and stability.

Note: Contact the IBM support before you apply any changes to the MariaDB or MongoDB packages in your PowerVC environment to ensures that the updates are reviewed and approved by IBM.
Supported versions of MariaDB and MongoDB packages
  • MongoDB- IBM includes the MongoDB package directly in PowerVC. PowerVC 2.3.3 supports MongoDB 8.0.x.
  • MariaDB- The MariaDB packages are provided by the underlying operating system distribution. PowerVC 2.3.3 supports MariaDB 10.11.x.
Security updates
  • MongoDB- IBM provides the security updates for the MongoDB package.
  • MariaDB- The security updates are provided by the underlying operating system distribution. IBM evaluates the impact of the vulnerabilities and if required, incorporates updated or reconfigured MariaDB versions from the operating system distribution during interim fixes or upgrade operations.
Attention:
  • Do not apply security updates to MariaDB or MongoDB packages or upgrade the version of MariaDB or MongoDB packages that are used by PowerVC without prior consultation with IBM support.
  • Any updates, including security updates, must be performed only after you contact IBM Support.
  • Unauthorized updates might lead to incompatibility or unsupported configurations, potentially impacting system stability, and support coverage.

Software packages support

IBM provides and delivers the updates for IBM packages that are required for PowerVC.

Software packages that are installed from the operating system repositories that are required for PowerVC functions, receives updates from the operating system. These updates include updates for security vulnerabilities for the packages that are provided by the operating systems.

Do not replace IBM provided packages with an updated version that the operating system repository delivers. Contact the IBM support for assistance to obtain the most current version of IBM PowerVC delivered packages from Fix Central for your PowerVC release.

For packages that are provided by an operating system repository, only the operating system repository delivers all the updates. To ensure compatibility with the IBM delivered packages, it is recommended to consult with the IBM support before you perform any updates.

Any updates to the packages that are delivered by the operating system might require updates to the IBM delivered packages.

Web browsers

  • Mozilla Firefox version 149.0.2 (64-bit)
    Note: PowerVC does not load if Ask me every time option is selected as the custom history setting.
  • Google Chrome version 147.0.7727.102 (Official Build) (64-bit) and latest
  • Microsoft Edge version 147.0.3912.60 (Official Build) (64-bit)
  • Safari version 17.3.1 (19617.2.4.11.12) Support available only on Mac
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