Hardware and software requirements
The following information provides a consolidated view of the hardware and software requirements for your IBM® Power® Virtualization Center environment.
- Accounts that are used with PowerVC must be configured to use the Bash shell.
- Make sure that the version of RSCT installed must have the latest fixes applied.
- Support for software-defined networking has been withdrawn.
Hosts
Host type | Supported hardware | Supported operating systems |
---|---|---|
PowerVC management server |
ppc64le and x86_64 |
For POWER8® and POWER9™ - RHEL 8.2, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.5, SLES 15 SP1, and SLES 15 SP2 For x86_64 - RHEL 8.2, RHEL 8.4, and RHEL 8.5 Make sure you install the following RHEL editions.
Note:
|
Managed hosts |
IBM
POWER7® or later processor classes.
|
For more information about the supported guest operating system levels for deployed
virtual machines, see Guest operating system support.
Notes:
|
Processor capacitycolumn depends on the type of host that is being used as the PowerVC management server.
- If the PowerVC management server is
PowerVM®,
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
Processor capacity
refers to the number of physical cores.
Minimum | Recommended | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is larger) | Up to 500 | 501-1000 | 1001-2000 | 2001-3000 | 3001-6000 | |
Processor capacity | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 |
Virtual CPUs1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 |
Memory (GB) | 24 | 32 | 35 | 40 | 45 | 55 |
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
|
||||||
Disk used (GB) | 80 | 100 | 120 | 140 | 160 | 180 |
1: These can be shared or dedicated. |
Minimum | Recommended | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Number of managed virtual machines or volumes (whichever is larger) | Up to 500 | 501-1000 | 1001-2000 | 2001-3000 | 3001-6000 | 6001-10000 | |
Processor capacity | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 | 12 |
Virtual CPUs1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 | 12 |
Memory (GB) | 24 | 50 | 60 | 75 | 80 | 85 | 100 |
Note: Allocate the swap space according to the OS recommendations.
|
|||||||
Disk used (GB) | 80 | 100 | 120 | 140 | 160 | 180 | 200 |
1: These can be shared or dedicated. 2: You can scale up to 50 hosts and the memory requirement can vary based on host, storage and fabric combination. |
- /tmp: 250 MB
- /usr: 3.5 GiB
- /opt: 5 GiB
- /srv: 2 GiB
- /var: 3 GiB
- Number of HMC or NovaLink managed hosts
- Duration of PowerVC run time
- Size of each log file that powervc-diag collects
OpenStack release
PowerVC version 2.0.1 is built on OpenStack Ussuri release.
Guest operating system support
This table lists the support for virtual machine operating systems on managed hosts.Operating system | Little endian (LE) or big endian (BE) | Version |
---|---|---|
AIX® | BE |
7.1 TL0, SP0 7.2 TL0, SP0 Note: For secure boot, 7.2 TL3 on POWER9 with
firmware 920 and HMC V9R1.xxx with latest fixes.
|
IBM i | BE |
7.2 TR1 7.3 TR3 7.4 Version 7.2 TR8, 7.3 TR4 is required for POWER9 |
RHEL | LE |
RHEL 7.6-ALT 7.8 7.9 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, and 8.4 |
SLES | LE | 12 and
15 SLES 15 SP1 and SLES 15 SP2 |
Ubuntu | LE |
18.04 |
Hardware Management Console
Item | Requirement |
---|---|
Software level |
PowerVC supports the following HMC
releases:
|
PowerVM NovaLink
- Ubuntu 18.04 with latest fixes.
- RHEL 8.2 and RHEL 8.3 (LE)
Number of virtual machines | Up to 250 | 251-500 | More than 500 |
---|---|---|---|
RHEL 8.2 - Memory needed in a standard environment (GB) | 8 | 14 | 18 |
Ubuntu 18.04 - Memory needed in a standard environment (GB) | 2.5 | 5 | 10 |
Virtual I/O Server
- 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 managing it with PowerVC.
- A minimum of 6GB memory is required for VIOS 3.1.x.
For VIOS sizing requirements when using SR-IOV, see IBM PowerVM Best Practices.
Platform | Requirement |
---|---|
Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) |
|
Network
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 . |
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 running the install script. Otherwise, the installer auto-selects eth0 and uses whichever stack is set up for that interface. As long as connectivity exists, 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.
- PowerVC version 2.0.1 does not support IPv6.
- Make sure that the management system has DNS properly configured so that 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 as below:x.x.x.x hostname short_hostname
IPv4 Support | |
---|---|
Management Server | Virtual Machine deployed by PowerVC |
Yes | Yes |
Fabrics
PowerVC supports up to 25 fabrics.Supported Driver | Documentation |
---|---|
Brocade | Brocade
zone driver system requirements Virtual fabric support is included.
Note: Brocade zone OpenStack driver for Ussuri
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 supported by
an OpenStack driver can be registered with PowerVC, but the level of functionality 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 traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device will be referred to the
device vendor.
|
Storage drivers
Some storage drivers support different devices depending on the OpenStack release.
Supported Driver | Documentation |
---|---|
Hitachi | Enterprise Hitachi Block Storage Driver (HBSD) 10.0.0 Supported devices are listed in the Hitachi Block Storage Driver for OpenStack v 10.0.0 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 Support for EMC Hybrid VMAX3 is deprecated. Also, SMI-S Provider management and EMC VMAX2 arrays are no longer supported.. |
EMC VNX | Dell EMC VNX driver |
IBM
Storwize® family IBM SVC |
IBM
Storwize family and SVC volume driver
IBM Flash System v9000 Overview For supported models, see OpenStack support summary. |
IBM XIV® Storage System, IBM FlashSystem A9000, or IBM FlashSystem A9000R | IBM Storage volume driver
For supported models, see OpenStack support summary.
Note: Unless stated otherwise, all references to XIV Storage System in this guide relate all members of the
Spectrum Accelerate Family (XIV Storage System, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystem A9000, or FlashSystem A9000R).
|
Pure Storage | For more information on supported models, see Pure Storage iSCSI and Fibre Channel volume drivers |
Pluggable | A pluggable storage device is an OpenStack supported storage device. Any storage
device supported by an OpenStack driver can be
registered with PowerVC, but the level
of functionality 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 traced back to a pluggable driver or underlying device will be 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
Item | Requirement | More information |
---|---|---|
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server (optional) | OpenLDAP 2.0 | OpenLDAP |
Microsoft Active Directory 2016 | Active Directory Domain Services | |
IBM Security Directory Suite 8.0.1 | IBM Security Directory Suite |
Web browsers
- Mozilla Firefox ESR 83Note: PowerVC does not load if Ask me every time is selected as the custom history setting.
- Google Chrome, version 86.0.4240.198
- Microsoft Edge version 86.0.622.58 (official build) (64-bit) and above
- Safari, version 12