Before you run the provision tool

• (Recommended) Run prereq.sh to get the system ready to deploy Omnia. Alternatively, ensure that Ansible 2.14 and Python 3.9 are installed on the system.

• All target bare-metal servers should be reachable to the chosen control plane.

• The UEFI boot setting should be configured in the BIOS settings before initiating PXE boot on the nodes.

• Set the IP address of the control plane. The control plane NIC connected to remote servers (through the switch) should be configured with two IPs (BMC IP and admin IP) in a shared LOM or hybrid set up. In the case dedicated network topology, a single IP (admin IP) is required.

Control plane NIC IP configuration in a LOM setup

Control plane NIC IP configuration in a dedicated setup

• Set the hostname of the control plane in the hostname. domain name format.

  Hostname requirements

  • The hostname should not contain the following characters: , (comma), . (period) or _ (underscore). However, the domain name is allowed with commas and periods.

  • The hostname cannot start or end with a hyphen (-).

  • No upper case characters are allowed in the hostname.

  • The hostname cannot start with a number.

  • The hostname and the domain name (that is: hostname00000x.domain.xxx) cumulatively cannot exceed 64 characters. For example, if the node_name provided in input/provision_config.yml is ‘node’, and the domain_name provided is ‘omnia.test’, Omnia will set the hostname of a target cluster node to ‘node000001.omnia.test’. Omnia appends 6 digits to the hostname to individually name each target node.

  For example, controlplane.omnia.test is acceptable.

  hostnamectl set-hostname controlplane.omnia.test
  

Note

The domain name specified for the control plane should be the same as the one specified under domain_name in input/provision_config.yml.

• To provision the bare metal servers, download one of the following ISOs to the control plane:

  1. Rocky Linux 8

  2. RHEL 8.x

  3. Ubuntu

Note

Ensure the ISO provided has downloaded seamlessly (No corruption). Verify the SHA checksum/ download size of the ISO file before provisioning to avoid future failures.

Note the compatibility between cluster OS and control plane OS below:

Control Plane OS	Cluster Node OS	Compatibility
RHEL [1]	RHEL	Yes
RHEL [1]	Rocky	Yes
Rocky	Rocky	Yes
Ubuntu	Ubuntu	Yes
Rocky	Ubuntu	No
RHEL	Ubuntu	No
Ubuntu	RHEL	No
Ubuntu	Rocky	No

[1] (1,2)

Ensure that control planes running RHEL have an active subscription or are configured to access local repositories. The following repositories should be enabled on the control plane: AppStream, BaseOS.

• Ensure that all connection names under the network manager match their corresponding device names.

  To verify network connection names:

  nmcli connection
  

  To verify the device name:

  ip link show
  

In the event of a mismatch, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<nic name> using vi editor.

• When discovering nodes via a mapping file, all target nodes should be set up in PXE mode before running the playbook.

Note

• After configuration and installation of the cluster, changing the control plane is not supported. If you need to change the control plane, you must redeploy the entire cluster.

• For servers with an existing OS being discovered via BMC, ensure that the first PXE device on target nodes should be the designated active NIC for PXE booting.

If you have any feedback about Omnia documentation, please reach out at omnia.readme@dell.com.