Local Storage Installation Requirements

This page summarizes the infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, operating-system, DNS, SSL, and supporting-service requirements for a Virtuozzo Application Management deployment that uses local storage.

The local-storage scenario is divided into four deployment profiles: Proof of Concept, Sandbox, Production, and High-Performance Production. Production installations can be planned either for higher availability by increasing the number of user hosts, or for higher per-host capacity by using more powerful servers.

Virtuozzo Application Management local storage requirements — Local storage installation profiles and recommended resources

On this page

Platform Types
Server Requirements
Infrastructure Hosts
User Hosts
Running on Virtual Machines
Operating System Requirements
Additional Recommendations
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Platform Types

PoCUsed for demonstrations and lightweight testing.

SandboxA non-production environment intended for testing.

ProductionA public or private platform used for production workloads.

High-Performance ProductionA public-cloud profile designed for demanding workloads and higher performance.

Production modes: choose HA mode to increase the number of user hosts, or Capacity mode to increase the capacity of each user host.

Server Requirements

The platform uses two server classes:

Infrastructure hosts: run the internal platform services.
User hosts: run customer applications and environments.

Infrastructure and user hosts — Infrastructure hosts and user hosts

Infrastructure Hosts

High availability is required. Plan at least two infrastructure hosts, or three when a Galera-based database cluster is used. A single-host start is possible for PoC or Sandbox environments when total CPU, memory, and storage are doubled, or temporarily when a second host will be added before commercial launch.

CPU

x86-64 with Intel VT-x or AMD-V support.
Avoid low-voltage processors such as Intel Atom.
Minimum clock: 2.0 GHz for bare metal or 2.4 GHz for VM-based hosts.

Profile	CPU per Infrastructure Host	RAM per Infrastructure Host	External / Internal Network
PoC	8 cores / 16 threads	32 GB	100 Mbit / 1 Gbit
Sandbox	10 cores / 20 threads	48 GB	1 Gbit / 1 Gbit
Production	12 cores / 24 threads	64 GB	1 Gbit / 10 Gbit
High-Performance Production	16 cores / 32 threads	96 GB	10 Gbit / 25 Gbit

Memory Guidance

Dual-channel or quad-channel memory is recommended.
Avoid low-voltage, high-latency memory.
Low-end and mid-range DDR3 is unsuitable.

Storage

Desktop-grade SSDs are acceptable only for PoC.
Datacenter-grade SSDs are recommended for Sandbox and Production.
NVMe is recommended for High-Performance Production.
Local or SAN disks are supported, but each disk must belong to only one infrastructure host.
Use multipathing for SAN storage.
Hardware RAID1 is preferred; software RAID mirroring is also supported.
LVM is not recommended for storage larger than 2 TB.
Recommended minimum performance: about 4,000 IOPS.
/vz sustained performance: 500 MB/s read, 150 MB/s write, 16 MB/s random read, and 4 MB/s random write.
Use 6 Gbit/s throughput for SATA or SAS devices.
Reserve 100–150 GB usable mirrored storage for the operating system.
Reserve another 400–1,000 GB usable storage for /vz.

User Hosts

PoC and Sandbox: at least one user host.
Production HA: at least six lower-performance servers.
Production Capacity: at least three higher-performance servers.
High-Performance Production HA: at least six high-performance servers.
High-Performance Production Capacity: at least three top-performance servers.

For production installations with strict reliability requirements, keep an additional spare host available for rapid container recovery after an unexpected hardware failure.

Profile	CPU per User Host	RAM per User Host	External / Internal Network
PoC	12 cores / 24 threads	48 GB	100 Mbit / 1 Gbit
Sandbox	16 cores / 32 threads	64 GB	1 Gbit / 1 Gbit
Production (HA)	16 cores / 32 threads	64 GB	1 Gbit / 10 Gbit
Production (Capacity)	24 cores / 48 threads	128 GB	1 Gbit / 10 Gbit
High-Performance Production (HA)	24 cores / 48 threads	128 GB	10 Gbit / 25 Gbit
High-Performance Production (Capacity)	40 cores / 80 threads	256 GB	10 Gbit / 25 Gbit

User Host Storage

Use datacenter-grade SSDs for Sandbox and Production, and NVMe for High-Performance Production.
Local or SAN disks are supported, but each disk must be assigned to one user host only.
Use multipathing for SAN.
Hardware RAID1 is preferred; software RAID may be used as an alternative.
LVM is not recommended when storage exceeds 2 TB.
Recommended minimum performance: about 8,000 IOPS.
/vz sustained performance: 600 MB/s read, 250 MB/s write, 24 MB/s random read, and 8 MB/s random write.
Reserve 100–150 GB usable mirrored storage for the operating system.
Reserve 800–4,000 GB usable storage for /vz.

A single user container typically uses about 1.5–2.2 GB. Around 1,000 containers therefore require roughly 2 TB, plus an additional 1–2 TB for application data. A typical recommendation is 1.5–3 TB or more usable storage per user host. A gradual “grow /vz as you grow” plan can start from 1,000 GB, subject to review by the Operations Team.

Running Platform on Virtual Machines

Infrastructure and user hosts can run on virtual machines. Supported virtualization technologies include:

KVM
VMware ESXi
Virtuozzo VM
Microsoft Hyper-V

Both bare-metal servers and virtual machines can be used in production, although bare metal generally provides better performance.

Operating System Requirements

Common Requirements

Install CentOS 7, RHEL 7, or Virtuozzo 7 on all infrastructure and user hosts. During deployment, the hosts are redeployed to Virtuozzo 7 while mandatory system configuration files are preserved. The partitions associated with /boot, /rootfs, and /vz are formatted, so all existing data on them is lost.

Partitioning

Mount Point	Recommended Size	File System
`/boot`	2 GB	ext4
`/`	70–100 GB; 70 GB minimum, 100 GB recommended	ext4
swap	4–8 GB RAM: equal to RAM; 8–64 GB RAM: half of RAM; 64+ GB RAM: 32 GB	swap
`/vz`	All remaining storage after creating `/`, `/boot`, and swap	single ext4 file system

The server timezone must be set to UTC during installation and must remain unchanged afterward.

Additional Recommendations

Network

Provide at least two network interfaces per server: WAN with a public IP and LAN connected to a managed switch.
Internal LAN speed should be at least 1 Gbit/s.
Use at least a /20 internal subnet; /8 or /16 is preferred.
Default region: at least /20, including /26 for infrastructure and hosts.
Remote regions: at least /22, including /29 for infrastructure and /28 for hosts.
Do not use 10.0.0.0/24; it is reserved for NGINX HA applications.
External WAN speed should be at least 100 Mbit/s; 1 Gbit/s is recommended.
Each infrastructure and user host requires a public IP on the WAN connection.
Provide at least two public IPs for Shared Load Balancers.
Provide one public IP for the Patcher sub-platform.
Optionally provide two or more public IPs for the SSH Gate.
Provide additional public IPs for end-user containers as needed.
Allow all outbound traffic and configure firewall rules with the Operations Team.

DNS

Delegate both the infrastructure and user domains to the platform Shared Load Balancers. A typical setup uses the following name servers and glue records:

infra-domain.hosterdomain.com IN NS ns1.infra-domain.hosterdomain.com
infra-domain.hosterdomain.com IN NS ns2.infra-domain.hosterdomain.com
ns1.infra-domain.hosterdomain.com IN A 1.1.1.1
ns2.infra-domain.hosterdomain.com IN A 2.2.2.2

user-domain.hosterdomain.com IN NS ns1.user-domain.hosterdomain.com
user-domain.hosterdomain.com IN NS ns2.user-domain.hosterdomain.com
ns1.user-domain.hosterdomain.com IN A 1.1.1.1
ns2.user-domain.hosterdomain.com IN A 2.2.2.2

Do not create SOA records for the delegated infrastructure and user domains on the parent DNS servers, otherwise the delegation may fail.

SSL

Provide wildcard certificates covering both domains and all subdomains:

infra-domain.hosterdomain.com
*.infra-domain.hosterdomain.com
user-domain.hosterdomain.com
*.user-domain.hosterdomain.com

Uploader Storage

Uploader storage can be mounted over NFS or provided as a SCSI LUN such as iSCSI with ext4. External shared storage is recommended. A local disk on an infrastructure host is possible but not recommended. In some deployments, uploader storage can be shared with the Docker template cache.

Docker Templates Cache Storage

Use a SCSI LUN such as iSCSI with ext4. External shared storage is recommended. Local infrastructure-host storage is possible but not recommended. Cache data is temporary, so redundancy and backups are not required; however, cluster-wide Docker environment creation becomes unavailable if this storage fails.

Operating System Settings

Virtuozzo Application Management requires a root account with user ID and group ID 0 on VZ-based hosts. Password authentication must be enabled for this account on all VZ-based host nodes.