Minimal architecture
A development architecture (minimal architecture) provides a validated design for development and testing environments. Minimal architecture uses separate servers for each component, which lets you test realistic configurations while minimizing infrastructure needs.
For production environments, use the high‑availability architecture. The minimal architecture doesn’t provide redundancy.
Before you begin
- Review the architecture overview to understand core components
- Check the system requirements for hardware specifications
- Review the system requirements for connectivity needs
Understand the minimal architecture
The minimal architecture separates each component onto its own server:
A minimal (development) architecture is an Itential architecture where all components are installed as singletons and cannot gracefully tolerate failures. This architecture is not recommended for production environments and testing environments that require strict uptimes and redundancies. This architecture is suitable for development environments only.
Architecture overview
The Itential Platform application performs many reads and writes against the database and is sensitive to high latencies. All components must be installed in the same data center and have authentication enabled.
The minimum architecture is comprised of four virtual machines (VMs):
- One Itential Platform server
- One MongoDB server
- One Redis server
- One IAG server
Required user accounts
The validated designs are opinionated installations of Itential and its dependencies. The following user accounts are required by the dependencies.
MongoDB
Redis
Network requirements
In an environment where components are installed on more than one host, the following network traffic flows need to be allowed. All ports and networking specs are TCP protocol unless otherwise noted. Not all ports will need to be open for every supported architecture. Secure ports are only required when explicitly configured.
Hardware requirements
Processor
Processor specification requirements:
- Second generation or better Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors
- Third generation or better AMD EPYC 7000 series processors
Memory
Memory specification requirement:
- DDR5 DRAM 3200 MHz or higher
Storage
Storage performance requirements in IOPS (16 kiB):
- 20000+ IOPS
- Non-spinning media (SSD, NVMe)
Network
Network speed requirement:
- 10 Gbps or higher
In some instances, adding additional dedicated interfaces that are focused on routing specific traffic to specific external systems can be explored. This routing of traffic would be configured at the OS-level (custom interfaces and routes) and requires the system administrator to manage it. An example would be separating NSO traffic from Redis/MongoDB destined traffic.
Hypervisor/host OS settings
These settings are strongly recommended for high load applications of Itential Platform:
- CPU affinity settings or similar functionality to prevent CPU starvation
- Full memory reservation
- One physical CPU per VM is preferred
- Huge pages for memory support enabled (except MongoDB)
- Memory compression disabled
- Minimal CPU allocation settings for scheduler according to CPU clock
Example: Assuming an Itential Platform VM on a server capable of 2.5GHz nominal speed:
Follow hypervisor recommendations when performing CPU reservations. In most cases the total of all CPU reservations for all VMs on a host cannot be more than 90% of the host capacity as 10% is reserved by the host itself.
MongoDB discourages the utilization of Transparent Huge Pages.
Server specifications
For production environments, all Itential Platform components should be installed on their own individual servers to properly support High Availability (HA). Disk references to pronghorn (seen in older deployments) should be changed to itential.
