Host system requirements

Review the following requirements that relate to the computing and system setup of host machines for IBM Cloud Satellite®.

You can add hosts from other cloud providers to your location. For more information, see Cloud infrastructure providers.

If you plan on deploying Red Hat OpenShift clusters, make sure the operating system that you want to use for your hosts is supported for your location type and cluster version. For more information, see Red Hat OpenShift version information.
Make sure that you use official Red Hat certified hardware.
If you cannot meet these host requirements, contact IBM Support and include the following information: the host system configuration that you want, why you want the system configuration, and how many hosts you intend to create.

You can verify your host setup with the satellite-host-check script. For more information, see Checking your host setup.

Computing characteristics

Hosts must support x86-64-v2 architecture.
Hosts must run the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, or the latest Red Hat CoreOS with the kernel that is distributed with those versions. Other operating systems, such as Windows; other mainframe systems, such as IBM Z or IBM Power; and other kernel versions are not supported.
- For the latest RHEL 8 version information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux Release Dates.
- For the latest Red Hat CoreOS version information, see Red Hat CoreOS mirrors.
Make sure that you use minimal RHEL images. Do not install the LAMP stack. Do not install virtualization technologies on the hosts, including libvirtd or docker. Note that support for RHEL 7 hosts in your control plane ends on March 2nd, 2023. Follow the steps to migrate your hosts to RHEL 8.
Hosts can be physical or virtual machines. However, if your hosts are cloned virtual machines, be sure that each one has a unique network identity. For more information, see Why aren't my hosts attaching to my location?.
Red Hat CoreOS hosts must meet minimum sizing requirements and sufficient storage capacity.
RHEL hosts must meet minimum sizing requirements and sufficient storage capacity.
RHEL hosts must have the SELINUX=enforcing policy set. You can verify that this policy is set by running the sestatus command and looking for SELinux status: enabled in the output.
If your host includes GPU compute, make sure that you install the Node Feature Discovery and NVIDIA GPU operators. For more information, see the prerequisite steps in Deploying an app on a GPU machine.
Hostnames can contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters, -, or ..
Hosts must have an ext4 filesystem for the boot disk.

Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) packages and other machine configurations

Find a Red Hat CoreOS image for your system and make it available to your cloud provider. You can use any supported RHCOS image for your host.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) packages and other machine configurations

Hosts must have access to RHEL updates and the following packages.

These updates are required for hosts that are running RHEL. If your hosts are running Red Hat CoreOS images, you do not need to update the packages.

For RHEL 8

Repository 'rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms' is enabled for this system.
Repository 'rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms' is enabled for this system.

After the host is created, do not install any additional packages, configuration, or other customizations to your hosts. For more information, see Why can't I install extra software like vulnerability scanning tools on my host?.

You might need to refresh your packages on the host machine. For example, in IBM Cloud infrastructure you can run the following commands to add the required packages.

Refresh the Red Hat packages on your machine.
```
subscription-manager refresh
```

Enable the package repositories on your machine.

RHEL 7:

subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rh-common-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-supplementary-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpms

RHEL 8:

subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms

For more information about how to enable the RHEL packages in hosts that you add from other cloud providers, see Cloud infrastructure providers.