REC Installation Guide
- 1 Licensing
- 2 Introduction
- 3 Pre-Installation Requirements for REC Cluster
- 4 Installing REC
- 4.1 Obtaining the ISO Image
- 4.2 Preparing for Boot from ISO Image
- 4.2.1 Nokia OpenEdge Servers
- 4.2.2 HP Servers
- 4.2.3 Dell Servers
- 4.2.4 Ampere Servers
- 4.2.5 Marvell Servers
- 4.3 Booting from the ISO Image
- 4.3.1 Nokia OpenEdge Servers
- 4.3.2 HP Servers
- 4.3.3 Dell Servers
- 4.3.4 Ampere Servers
- 4.3.5 Marvell Servers
- 4.4 Uploading user_config.yaml
- 4.5 Monitoring Deployment Progress/Status
- 4.6 Verifying Deployment
- 4.7 Deployment Failures
- 4.8 RIC R0 Installation onto REC
Licensing
Radio Edge Cloud is Apache 2.0 licensed. The goal of the project is the packaging and installation of upstream Open Source projects. Each of those upstream projects is separately licensed. For a full list of packages included in REC you can refer to https://logs.akraino.org/production/vex-yul-akraino-jenkins-prod-1/ta-ci-build-amd64/313/work/results/rpmlists/rpmlist (the 313 in this URL is the Akraino REC/TA build number, see https://logs.akraino.org/production/vex-yul-akraino-jenkins-prod-1/ta-ci-build-amd64/ for the latest build.) All of the upstream projects that are packaged into the REC/TA build image are Open Source.
Introduction
This document outlines the steps to deploy Radio Edge Cloud (REC) cluster. It has a minimum of three controller nodes. Optionally it may include worker nodes if desired. REC was designed from the ground up to be a highly available, flexible, and cost-efficient system for the use and support of Cloud RAN and 5G networks. The production deployment of Radio Edge Cloud is intended to be done using the Akraino Regional Controller which has been significantly enhanced during the Akraino Release 1 timeframe, but for evaluation purposes, it is possible to deploy REC without the Regional Controller. Regardless of whether the Regional Controller is used, the installation process is cluster oriented. The Regional Controller or a human being initiates the process on the first controller in the cluster, then that controller automatically installs an image onto every other server in the cluster using IPMI and Ironic (from OpenStack) to perform a zero touch install.
In a Regional Controller based deployment, the Regional Controller API will be used to upload the REC Blueprint YAML (available from the REC repository) which informs the Regional Controller of where to obtain the REC ISO images, the REC workflows (executable code for creating, modifying and deleting REC sites) and the REC remote installer component (a container image which will be instantiated by the create workflow and which will then invoke the REC Deployer (which is located in the ISO DVD disc image file) which conducts the rest of the installation.
The instructions below skip most of this and directly invoke the REC Deployer from the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), integrated Lights Out (iLO) or integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) of a physical server. The basic workflow of the REC deployer is to copy a base image to the first controller in the cluster and then read the contents of a configuration file (typically called user_config.yaml) to deploy the base OS and all additional software to the rest of the nodes in the cluster.
Although the purpose of the Radio Edge Cloud is to run the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), the RIC software (which was written from scratch starting in the spring of 2019) is not quite stable enough yet to incorporate into the REC ISO image. The manual installation procedure described below does not result in the installation of the RIC. In the REC Continuous Deployment system, as of the Akraino Release 1 and 2 timeframe, a Jenkins job deploys a snapshot of the RIC and runs a small set of tests. These steps may be manually executed and this procedure is described in the last section of this WIKI document. Fully automated installation of the RIC as part of the REC will not be complete until sometime in 2020. If you are interested in actually interfacing a REC appliance with eNodeB/gNode B and radio infrastructure you should really join the Radio Edge Cloud Project Meetings on a weekly basis and let the REC team know of your interest. We will be happy to coordinate with you and welcome any testing that you can do.
Pre-Installation Requirements for REC Cluster
Hardware Requirements:
REC is a fully integrated stack from the hardware up to and including the application, so for best results, it is necessary to use one of the tested hardware configurations. Although REC is intended to run on a variety of different hardware platforms, it includes a hardware detector component that customizes each installation based on the hardware present and will need (possibly minor) changes to run on additional hardware configurations. Preliminary support is present in Akraino Release 1 of REC for HP DL380 generation 9 and 10, Dell R740xd and Nokia Open Edge servers, but the primary focus of Release 1 testing is the Nokia Open Edge servers, so some issues may be encountered with other server types.
Minimum of 3 nodes
Total Physical Compute Cores: 60 (120 vCPUs)
Total Physical Compute Memory: 192GB minimum per node
Total SSD-based OS Storage: 2.8 TB (6 x 480GB SSDs)
Total Application-based Raw Storage: 5.7 TB (6 x 960GB SSD0
Networking Per Server: Apps - 2 x 25GbE (per Server) and DCIM - 2 x 10GbE + 1 1Gbt (shared)
The specific recommended configuration as of the Release 1 timeframe is the Open Edge configuration documented in the Radio Edge Cloud Validation Lab
BIOS Requirements:
BIOS set to Legacy (Not UEFI, although UEFI support is partially implemented and should be available in 2020)
CPU Configuration/Turbo Mode Disabled
Virtualization Enabled
IPMI Enabled
Boot Order set with Hard Disk listed as first in the list.
As of Release 1 and 2, Radio Edge Cloud does not yet include automatic configuration for a pre-boot environment. The following versions were manually loaded on the Open Edge servers in the Radio Edge Cloud Validation Lab using the incomplete but functional script available here. In the future, automatic configuration of the pre-boot environment is expected to be a function of the Regional Controller under the direction of the REC pod create workflow script.
BIOS1: 3B06
BMC1: 3.13.00
BMC2: 3.08.00
CPLD: 0x01
Network Requirements:
The REC cluster requires the following segmented (VLAN), routed networks accessible by all nodes in the cluster:
External Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) Network
Out Of Band (OOB) (iLO/iDRAC) network(s)
Storage/Ceph network(s)
Internal network for Kubernetes connectivity
NTP and DNS accessibility
The REC installer will configure NTP and DNS using the parameters entered in the user_config.yaml. However, the network
must be configured for the REC cluster to be able to access the NTP and DNS servers prior to the install.
About user_config.yaml
The user_config.yaml file contains details for your REC cluster such as required network CIDRs, usernames, passwords,
DNS and NTP server ip addresses, etc. The REC configuration is flexible, but there are dependencies: e.g., using DPDK
requires a networking profile with ovs-dpdk type, a performance profile with CPU pinning & hugepages and performance
profile links on the compute node(s).
The following link points to the latest user_config template with descriptions and examples for every available parameter:
Note: the version number listed in the user_config.yaml needs to follow closely the version from the template. There is a strict version checking during deployment for the first two part of the version number. The following rules apply to the yaml's version parameter:
### Version numbering:
### X.0.0
### - Major structural changes compared to the previous version.
### - Requires all users to update their user configuration to
### the new template
### a.X.0
### - Significant changes in the template within current structure
### (e.g. new mandatory attributes)
### - Requires all users to update their user configuration according
### to the new template (e.g. add new mandatory attributes)
### a.b.X
### - Minor changes in template (e.g. new optional attributes or
### changes in possible values, value ranges or default values)
### - Backwards compatible
Example user_config.yaml
YAML Requirements
The YAML files need to edited/created using Linux editors or in Windows Notepad++
YAML files do not support TABS. You must space over to the location for the text.
Note: You have a better chance at creating a working YAML by editing an existing file or using the template rather than starting from scratch.
Installing REC
Obtaining the ISO Image
Recent builds can be obtained from the Akraino Nexus server. Choose either "latest" or a specific build number from the old release images directory for builds prior to the AMD/ARM split or the AMD64 builds or the ARM64 builds and download the file install.iso.
Akraino Release | REC or TA ISO Build | Build Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Build 9. This build has been removed from Nexus (probably due to age) | 2019-05-30 | Build number 9 is known to NOT work on Dell servers or any of the ARM options listed below. If attempting to install on Dell servers, it is suggested to use builds from no earlier than June 10th |
2 | Build 237. This build has been removed from Nexus (probably due to age) | 2019-11-18 | It is possible that there may still be some issues on Dell servers. Most testing has been done on Open Edge. Some builds between June 10th and November 18th have been successfully used on Dell servers, but because of a current lack of Remote Installer support for Dell (or indeed anything other than Open Edge), the manual testing is not as frequent as the automated testing of REC on Open Edge. If you are interested in testing or deploying on platforms other than Open Edge, please join the Radio Edge Cloud Project Meetings. |
3 - AMD64 | Build 237. This build has been removed from Nexus (probably due to age) | 2020-05-29 | This is a minor update to Akraino Release 2 of AMD64 based Radio Edge Cloud |
3 - ARM64 | Arm build 134. This build has been removed from Nexus (probably due to age) | 2020-04-13 | This is the first ARM based release of Radio Edge Cloud |
4 - AMD64 | 2020-11-03 | The ARM build is unchanged since Release 3 |