Recommended host practices

This topic provides recommended host practices for OKD.

These guidelines apply to OKD with software-defined networking (SDN), not Open Virtual Network (OVN).

The OKD node configuration file contains important options. For example, two parameters control the maximum number of pods that can be scheduled to a node: podsPerCore and maxPods.

When both options are in use, the lower of the two values limits the number of pods on a node. Exceeding these values can result in:

  • Increased CPU utilization.

  • Slow pod scheduling.

  • Potential out-of-memory scenarios, depending on the amount of memory in the node.

  • Exhausting the pool of IP addresses.

  • Resource overcommitting, leading to poor user application performance.

In Kubernetes, a pod that is holding a single container actually uses two containers. The second container is used to set up networking prior to the actual container starting. Therefore, a system running 10 pods will actually have 20 containers running.

Disk IOPS throttling from the cloud provider might have an impact on CRI-O and kubelet. They might get overloaded when there are large number of I/O intensive pods running on the nodes. It is recommended that you monitor the disk I/O on the nodes and use volumes with sufficient throughput for the workload.

podsPerCore sets the number of pods the node can run based on the number of processor cores on the node. For example, if podsPerCore is set to 10 on a node with 4 processor cores, the maximum number of pods allowed on the node will be 40.

  1. kubeletConfig:
  2. podsPerCore: 10

Setting podsPerCore to 0 disables this limit. The default is 0. podsPerCore cannot exceed maxPods.

maxPods sets the number of pods the node can run to a fixed value, regardless of the properties of the node.

  1. kubeletConfig:
  2. maxPods: 250

Creating a KubeletConfig CRD to edit kubelet parameters

The kubelet configuration is currently serialized as an Ignition configuration, so it can be directly edited. However, there is also a new kubelet-config-controller added to the Machine Config Controller (MCC). This lets you use a KubeletConfig custom resource (CR) to edit the kubelet parameters.

As the fields in the kubeletConfig object are passed directly to the kubelet from upstream Kubernetes, the kubelet validates those values directly. Invalid values in the kubeletConfig object might cause cluster nodes to become unavailable. For valid values, see the Kubernetes documentation.

Consider the following guidance:

  • Create one KubeletConfig CR for each machine config pool with all the config changes you want for that pool. If you are applying the same content to all of the pools, you need only one KubeletConfig CR for all of the pools.

  • Edit an existing KubeletConfig CR to modify existing settings or add new settings, instead of creating a CR for each change. It is recommended that you create a CR only to modify a different machine config pool, or for changes that are intended to be temporary, so that you can revert the changes.

  • As needed, create multiple KubeletConfig CRs with a limit of 10 per cluster. For the first KubeletConfig CR, the Machine Config Operator (MCO) creates a machine config appended with kubelet. With each subsequent CR, the controller creates another kubelet machine config with a numeric suffix. For example, if you have a kubelet machine config with a -2 suffix, the next kubelet machine config is appended with -3.

If you want to delete the machine configs, delete them in reverse order to avoid exceeding the limit. For example, you delete the kubelet-3 machine config before deleting the kubelet-2 machine config.

If you have a machine config with a kubelet-9 suffix, and you create another KubeletConfig CR, a new machine config is not created, even if there are fewer than 10 kubelet machine configs.

Example KubeletConfig CR

  1. $ oc get kubeletconfig
  1. NAME AGE
  2. set-max-pods 15m

Example showing a KubeletConfig machine config

  1. $ oc get mc | grep kubelet
  1. ...
  2. 99-worker-generated-kubelet-1 b5c5119de007945b6fe6fb215db3b8e2ceb12511 3.2.0 26m
  3. ...

The following procedure is an example to show how to configure the maximum number of pods per node on the worker nodes.

Prerequisites

  1. Obtain the label associated with the static MachineConfigPool CR for the type of node you want to configure. Perform one of the following steps:

    1. View the machine config pool:

      1. $ oc describe machineconfigpool <name>

      For example:

      1. $ oc describe machineconfigpool worker

      Example output

      1. apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
      2. kind: MachineConfigPool
      3. metadata:
      4. creationTimestamp: 2019-02-08T14:52:39Z
      5. generation: 1
      6. labels:
      7. custom-kubelet: set-max-pods (1)
      1If a label has been added it appears under labels.
    2. If the label is not present, add a key/value pair:

      1. $ oc label machineconfigpool worker custom-kubelet=set-max-pods

Procedure

  1. View the available machine configuration objects that you can select:

    1. $ oc get machineconfig

    By default, the two kubelet-related configs are 01-master-kubelet and 01-worker-kubelet.

  2. Check the current value for the maximum pods per node:

    1. $ oc describe node <node_name>

    For example:

    1. $ oc describe node ci-ln-5grqprb-f76d1-ncnqq-worker-a-mdv94

    Look for value: pods: <value> in the Allocatable stanza:

    Example output

    1. Allocatable:
    2. attachable-volumes-aws-ebs: 25
    3. cpu: 3500m
    4. hugepages-1Gi: 0
    5. hugepages-2Mi: 0
    6. memory: 15341844Ki
    7. pods: 250
  3. Set the maximum pods per node on the worker nodes by creating a custom resource file that contains the kubelet configuration:

    1. apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
    2. kind: KubeletConfig
    3. metadata:
    4. name: set-max-pods
    5. spec:
    6. machineConfigPoolSelector:
    7. matchLabels:
    8. custom-kubelet: set-max-pods (1)
    9. kubeletConfig:
    10. maxPods: 500 (2)
    1Enter the label from the machine config pool.
    2Add the kubelet configuration. In this example, use maxPods to set the maximum pods per node.

    The rate at which the kubelet talks to the API server depends on queries per second (QPS) and burst values. The default values, 50 for kubeAPIQPS and 100 for kubeAPIBurst, are sufficient if there are limited pods running on each node. It is recommended to update the kubelet QPS and burst rates if there are enough CPU and memory resources on the node.

    1. apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
    2. kind: KubeletConfig
    3. metadata:
    4. name: set-max-pods
    5. spec:
    6. machineConfigPoolSelector:
    7. matchLabels:
    8. custom-kubelet: set-max-pods
    9. kubeletConfig:
    10. maxPods: <pod_count>
    11. kubeAPIBurst: <burst_rate>
    12. kubeAPIQPS: <QPS>
    1. Update the machine config pool for workers with the label:

      1. $ oc label machineconfigpool worker custom-kubelet=set-max-pods
    2. Create the KubeletConfig object:

      1. $ oc create -f change-maxPods-cr.yaml
    3. Verify that the KubeletConfig object is created:

      1. $ oc get kubeletconfig

      Example output

      1. NAME AGE
      2. set-max-pods 15m

      Depending on the number of worker nodes in the cluster, wait for the worker nodes to be rebooted one by one. For a cluster with 3 worker nodes, this could take about 10 to 15 minutes.

  4. Verify that the changes are applied to the node:

    1. Check on a worker node that the maxPods value changed:

      1. $ oc describe node <node_name>
    2. Locate the Allocatable stanza:

      1. ...
      2. Allocatable:
      3. attachable-volumes-gce-pd: 127
      4. cpu: 3500m
      5. ephemeral-storage: 123201474766
      6. hugepages-1Gi: 0
      7. hugepages-2Mi: 0
      8. memory: 14225400Ki
      9. pods: 500 (1)
      10. ...
      1In this example, the pods parameter should report the value you set in the KubeletConfig object.
  5. Verify the change in the KubeletConfig object:

    1. $ oc get kubeletconfigs set-max-pods -o yaml

    This should show a status of True and type:Success, as shown in the following example:

    1. spec:
    2. kubeletConfig:
    3. maxPods: 500
    4. machineConfigPoolSelector:
    5. matchLabels:
    6. custom-kubelet: set-max-pods
    7. status:
    8. conditions:
    9. - lastTransitionTime: "2021-06-30T17:04:07Z"
    10. message: Success
    11. status: "True"
    12. type: Success

Modifying the number of unavailable worker nodes

By default, only one machine is allowed to be unavailable when applying the kubelet-related configuration to the available worker nodes. For a large cluster, it can take a long time for the configuration change to be reflected. At any time, you can adjust the number of machines that are updating to speed up the process.

Procedure

  1. Edit the worker machine config pool:

    1. $ oc edit machineconfigpool worker
  2. Add the maxUnavailable field and set the value:

    1. spec:
    2. maxUnavailable: <node_count>

    When setting the value, consider the number of worker nodes that can be unavailable without affecting the applications running on the cluster.

Control plane node sizing

The control plane node resource requirements depend on the number and type of nodes and objects in the cluster. The following control plane node size recommendations are based on the results of a control plane density focused testing, or Cluster-density. This test creates the following objects across a given number of namespaces:

  • 1 image stream

  • 1 build

  • 5 deployments, with 2 pod replicas in a sleep state, mounting 4 secrets, 4 config maps, and 1 downward API volume each

  • 5 services, each one pointing to the TCP/8080 and TCP/8443 ports of one of the previous deployments

  • 1 route pointing to the first of the previous services

  • 10 secrets containing 2048 random string characters

  • 10 config maps containing 2048 random string characters

Number of worker nodesCluster-density (namespaces)CPU coresMemory (GB)

27

500

4

16

120

1000

8

32

252

4000

16

64

501

4000

16

96

On a large and dense cluster with three masters or control plane nodes, the CPU and memory usage will spike up when one of the nodes is stopped, rebooted or fails. The failures can be due to unexpected issues with power, network or underlying infrastructure in addition to intentional cases where the cluster is restarted after shutting it down to save costs. The remaining two control plane nodes must handle the load in order to be highly available which leads to increase in the resource usage. This is also expected during upgrades because the masters are cordoned, drained, and rebooted serially to apply the operating system updates, as well as the control plane Operators update. To avoid cascading failures, keep the overall CPU and memory resource usage on the control plane nodes to at most 60% of all available capacity to handle the resource usage spikes. Increase the CPU and memory on the control plane nodes accordingly to avoid potential downtime due to lack of resources.

The node sizing varies depending on the number of nodes and object counts in the cluster. It also depends on whether the objects are actively being created on the cluster. During object creation, the control plane is more active in terms of resource usage compared to when the objects are in the running phase.

Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM ) runs on the control plane nodes and it’s memory footprint depends on the number of namespaces and user installed operators that OLM needs to manage on the cluster. Control plane nodes need to be sized accordingly to avoid OOM kills. Following data points are based on the results from cluster maximums testing.

Number of namespacesOLM memory at idle state (GB)OLM memory with 5 user operators installed (GB)

500

0.823

1.7

1000

1.2

2.5

1500

1.7

3.2

2000

2

4.4

3000

2.7

5.6

4000

3.8

7.6

5000

4.2

9.02

6000

5.8

11.3

7000

6.6

12.9

8000

6.9

14.8

9000

8

17.7

10,000

9.9

21.6

If you used an installer-provisioned infrastructure installation method, you cannot modify the control plane node size in a running OKD 4.11 cluster. Instead, you must estimate your total node count and use the suggested control plane node size during installation.

The recommendations are based on the data points captured on OKD clusters with OpenShift SDN as the network plug-in.

In OKD 4.11, half of a CPU core (500 millicore) is now reserved by the system by default compared to OKD 3.11 and previous versions. The sizes are determined taking that into consideration.

Increasing the flavor size of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) master instances

When you have overloaded AWS master nodes in a cluster and the master nodes require more resources, you can increase the flavor size of the master instances.

It is recommended to backup etcd before increasing the flavor size of the AWS master instances.

Prerequisites

  • You have an IPI (installer-provisioned infrastructure) or UPI (user-provisioned infrastructure) cluster on AWS.

Procedure

  1. Open the AWS console, fetch the master instances.

  2. Stop one master instance.

  3. Select the stopped instance, and click ActionsInstance SettingsChange instance type.

  4. Change the instance to a larger type, ensuring that the type is the same base as the previous selection, and apply changes. For example, you can change m6i.xlarge to m6i.2xlarge or m6i.4xlarge.

  5. Backup the instance, and repeat the steps for the next master instance.

Additional resources

For large and dense clusters, etcd can suffer from poor performance if the keyspace grows too large and exceeds the space quota. Periodically maintain and defragment etcd to free up space in the data store. Monitor Prometheus for etcd metrics and defragment it when required; otherwise, etcd can raise a cluster-wide alarm that puts the cluster into a maintenance mode that accepts only key reads and deletes.

Monitor these key metrics:

  • etcd_server_quota_backend_bytes, which is the current quota limit

  • etcd_mvcc_db_total_size_in_use_in_bytes, which indicates the actual database usage after a history compaction

  • etcd_debugging_mvcc_db_total_size_in_bytes, which shows the database size, including free space waiting for defragmentation

For more information about defragmenting etcd, see the “Defragmenting etcd data” section.

Because etcd writes data to disk and persists proposals on disk, its performance depends on disk performance. Slow disks and disk activity from other processes can cause long fsync latencies. Those latencies can cause etcd to miss heartbeats, not commit new proposals to the disk on time, and ultimately experience request timeouts and temporary leader loss. Run etcd on machines that are backed by SSD or NVMe disks with low latency and high throughput. Consider single-level cell (SLC) solid-state drives (SSDs), which provide 1 bit per memory cell, are durable and reliable, and are ideal for write-intensive workloads.

The following hard disk features provide optimal etcd performance:

  • Low latency to support fast read operation.

  • High-bandwidth writes for faster compactions and defragmentation.

  • High-bandwidth reads for faster recovery from failures.

  • Solid state drives as a minimum selection, however NVMe drives are preferred.

  • Server-grade hardware from various manufacturers for increased reliability.

  • RAID 0 technology for increased performance.

  • Dedicated etcd drives. Do not place log files or other heavy workloads on etcd drives.

Avoid NAS or SAN setups, and spinning drives. Always benchmark using utilities such as fio. Continuously monitor the cluster performance as it increases.

Avoid using the Network File System (NFS) protocol.

Some key metrics to monitor on a deployed OKD cluster are p99 of etcd disk write ahead log duration and the number of etcd leader changes. Use Prometheus to track these metrics.

  • The etcd_disk_wal_fsync_duration_seconds_bucket metric reports the etcd disk fsync duration.

  • The etcd_server_leader_changes_seen_total metric reports the leader changes.

  • To rule out a slow disk and confirm that the disk is reasonably fast, verify that the 99th percentile of the etcd_disk_wal_fsync_duration_seconds_bucket is less than 10 ms.

To validate the hardware for etcd before or after you create the OKD cluster, you can use an I/O benchmarking tool called fio.

Prerequisites

  • Container runtimes such as Podman or Docker are installed on the machine that you’re testing.

  • Data is written to the /var/lib/etcd path.

Procedure

  • Run fio and analyze the results:

    • If you use Podman, run this command:

      1. $ sudo podman run --volume /var/lib/etcd:/var/lib/etcd:Z quay.io/openshift-scale/etcd-perf
    • If you use Docker, run this command:

      1. $ sudo docker run --volume /var/lib/etcd:/var/lib/etcd:Z quay.io/openshift-scale/etcd-perf

The output reports whether the disk is fast enough to host etcd by comparing the 99th percentile of the fsync metric captured from the run to see if it is less than 10 ms.

Because etcd replicates the requests among all the members, its performance strongly depends on network input/output (I/O) latency. High network latencies result in etcd heartbeats taking longer than the election timeout, which results in leader elections that are disruptive to the cluster. A key metric to monitor on a deployed OKD cluster is the 99th percentile of etcd network peer latency on each etcd cluster member. Use Prometheus to track the metric.

The histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(etcd_network_peer_round_trip_time_seconds_bucket[2m])) metric reports the round trip time for etcd to finish replicating the client requests between the members. Ensure that it is less than 50 ms.

Additional resources

Defragmenting etcd data

Defragment etcd data to reclaim disk space after events that cause disk fragmentation, such as etcd history compaction.

History compaction is performed automatically every five minutes and leaves gaps in the back-end database. This fragmented space is available for use by etcd, but is not available to the host file system. You must defragment etcd to make this space available to the host file system.

Defragmentation occurs automatically, but you can also trigger it manually.

Automatic defragmentation is good for most cases, because the etcd operator uses cluster information to determine the most efficient operation for the user.

Automatic defragmentation

The etcd Operator automatically defragments disks. No manual intervention is needed.

Verify that the defragmentation process is successful by viewing one of these logs:

  • etcd logs

  • cluster-etcd-operator pod

  • operator status error log

Automatic defragmentation can cause leader election failure in various OpenShift core components, such as the Kubernetes controller manager, which triggers a restart of the failing component. The restart is harmless and either triggers failover to the next running instance or the component resumes work again after the restart.

Example log output for successful defragmentation

  1. etcd member has been defragmented: <member_name>, memberID: <member_id>

Example log output for unsuccessful defragmentation

  1. failed defrag on member: <member_name>, memberID: <member_id>: <error_message>

Manual defragmentation

A Prometheus alert indicates when you need to use manual defragmentation. The alert is displayed in two cases:

  • When etcd uses more than 50% of its available space for more than 10 minutes

  • When etcd is actively using less than 50% of its total database size for more than 10 minutes

Defragmenting etcd is a blocking action. The etcd member will not respond until defragmentation is complete. For this reason, wait at least one minute between defragmentation actions on each of the pods to allow the cluster to recover.

Follow this procedure to defragment etcd data on each etcd member.

Prerequisites

  • You have access to the cluster as a user with the cluster-admin role.

Procedure

  1. Determine which etcd member is the leader, because the leader should be defragmented last.

    1. Get the list of etcd pods:

      1. $ oc get pods -n openshift-etcd -o wide | grep -v guard | grep etcd

      Example output

      1. etcd-ip-10-0-159-225.example.redhat.com 3/3 Running 0 175m 10.0.159.225 ip-10-0-159-225.example.redhat.com <none> <none>
      2. etcd-ip-10-0-191-37.example.redhat.com 3/3 Running 0 173m 10.0.191.37 ip-10-0-191-37.example.redhat.com <none> <none>
      3. etcd-ip-10-0-199-170.example.redhat.com 3/3 Running 0 176m 10.0.199.170 ip-10-0-199-170.example.redhat.com <none> <none>
    2. Choose a pod and run the following command to determine which etcd member is the leader:

      1. $ oc rsh -n openshift-etcd etcd-ip-10-0-159-225.example.redhat.com etcdctl endpoint status --cluster -w table

      Example output

      1. Defaulting container name to etcdctl.
      2. Use 'oc describe pod/etcd-ip-10-0-159-225.example.redhat.com -n openshift-etcd' to see all of the containers in this pod.
      3. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+
      4. | ENDPOINT | ID | VERSION | DB SIZE | IS LEADER | IS LEARNER | RAFT TERM | RAFT INDEX | RAFT APPLIED INDEX | ERRORS |
      5. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+
      6. | https://10.0.191.37:2379 | 251cd44483d811c3 | 3.4.9 | 104 MB | false | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | |
      7. | https://10.0.159.225:2379 | 264c7c58ecbdabee | 3.4.9 | 104 MB | false | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | |
      8. | https://10.0.199.170:2379 | 9ac311f93915cc79 | 3.4.9 | 104 MB | true | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | |
      9. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+

      Based on the IS LEADER column of this output, the https://10.0.199.170:2379 endpoint is the leader. Matching this endpoint with the output of the previous step, the pod name of the leader is etcd-ip-10-0-199-170.example.redhat.com.

  2. Defragment an etcd member.

    1. Connect to the running etcd container, passing in the name of a pod that is not the leader:

      1. $ oc rsh -n openshift-etcd etcd-ip-10-0-159-225.example.redhat.com
    2. Unset the ETCDCTL_ENDPOINTS environment variable:

      1. sh-4.4# unset ETCDCTL_ENDPOINTS
    3. Defragment the etcd member:

      1. sh-4.4# etcdctl --command-timeout=30s --endpoints=https://localhost:2379 defrag

      Example output

      1. Finished defragmenting etcd member[https://localhost:2379]

      If a timeout error occurs, increase the value for --command-timeout until the command succeeds.

    4. Verify that the database size was reduced:

      1. sh-4.4# etcdctl endpoint status -w table --cluster

      Example output

      1. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+
      2. | ENDPOINT | ID | VERSION | DB SIZE | IS LEADER | IS LEARNER | RAFT TERM | RAFT INDEX | RAFT APPLIED INDEX | ERRORS |
      3. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+
      4. | https://10.0.191.37:2379 | 251cd44483d811c3 | 3.4.9 | 104 MB | false | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | |
      5. | https://10.0.159.225:2379 | 264c7c58ecbdabee | 3.4.9 | 41 MB | false | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | | (1)
      6. | https://10.0.199.170:2379 | 9ac311f93915cc79 | 3.4.9 | 104 MB | true | false | 7 | 91624 | 91624 | |
      7. +---------------------------+------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------+-----------+------------+--------------------+--------+

      This example shows that the database size for this etcd member is now 41 MB as opposed to the starting size of 104 MB.

    5. Repeat these steps to connect to each of the other etcd members and defragment them. Always defragment the leader last.

      Wait at least one minute between defragmentation actions to allow the etcd pod to recover. Until the etcd pod recovers, the etcd member will not respond.

  3. If any NOSPACE alarms were triggered due to the space quota being exceeded, clear them.

    1. Check if there are any NOSPACE alarms:

      1. sh-4.4# etcdctl alarm list

      Example output

      1. memberID:12345678912345678912 alarm:NOSPACE
    2. Clear the alarms:

      1. sh-4.4# etcdctl alarm disarm

Next steps

After defragmentation, if etcd still uses more than 50% of its available space, consider increasing the disk quota for etcd.

OKD infrastructure components

The following infrastructure workloads do not incur OKD worker subscriptions:

  • Kubernetes and OKD control plane services that run on masters

  • The default router

  • The integrated container image registry

  • The HAProxy-based Ingress Controller

  • The cluster metrics collection, or monitoring service, including components for monitoring user-defined projects

  • Cluster aggregated logging

  • Service brokers

  • Red Hat Quay

  • Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes

  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps

  • Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines

Any node that runs any other container, pod, or component is a worker node that your subscription must cover.

For information on infrastructure nodes and which components can run on infrastructure nodes, see the “Red Hat OpenShift control plane and infrastructure nodes” section in the OpenShift sizing and subscription guide for enterprise Kubernetes document.

Moving the monitoring solution

The monitoring stack includes multiple components, including Prometheus, Thanos Querier, and Alertmanager. The Cluster Monitoring Operator manages this stack. To redeploy the monitoring stack to infrastructure nodes, you can create and apply a custom config map.

Procedure

  1. Save the following ConfigMap definition as the cluster-monitoring-configmap.yaml file:

    1. apiVersion: v1
    2. kind: ConfigMap
    3. metadata:
    4. name: cluster-monitoring-config
    5. namespace: openshift-monitoring
    6. data:
    7. config.yaml: |+
    8. alertmanagerMain:
    9. nodeSelector:
    10. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    11. prometheusK8s:
    12. nodeSelector:
    13. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    14. prometheusOperator:
    15. nodeSelector:
    16. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    17. k8sPrometheusAdapter:
    18. nodeSelector:
    19. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    20. kubeStateMetrics:
    21. nodeSelector:
    22. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    23. telemeterClient:
    24. nodeSelector:
    25. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    26. openshiftStateMetrics:
    27. nodeSelector:
    28. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
    29. thanosQuerier:
    30. nodeSelector:
    31. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""

    Running this config map forces the components of the monitoring stack to redeploy to infrastructure nodes.

  2. Apply the new config map:

    1. $ oc create -f cluster-monitoring-configmap.yaml
  3. Watch the monitoring pods move to the new machines:

    1. $ watch 'oc get pod -n openshift-monitoring -o wide'
  4. If a component has not moved to the infra node, delete the pod with this component:

    1. $ oc delete pod -n openshift-monitoring <pod>

    The component from the deleted pod is re-created on the infra node.

Moving the default registry

You configure the registry Operator to deploy its pods to different nodes.

Prerequisites

  • Configure additional machine sets in your OKD cluster.

Procedure

  1. View the config/instance object:

    1. $ oc get configs.imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/cluster -o yaml

    Example output

    1. apiVersion: imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/v1
    2. kind: Config
    3. metadata:
    4. creationTimestamp: 2019-02-05T13:52:05Z
    5. finalizers:
    6. - imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/finalizer
    7. generation: 1
    8. name: cluster
    9. resourceVersion: "56174"
    10. selfLink: /apis/imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/v1/configs/cluster
    11. uid: 36fd3724-294d-11e9-a524-12ffeee2931b
    12. spec:
    13. httpSecret: d9a012ccd117b1e6616ceccb2c3bb66a5fed1b5e481623
    14. logging: 2
    15. managementState: Managed
    16. proxy: {}
    17. replicas: 1
    18. requests:
    19. read: {}
    20. write: {}
    21. storage:
    22. s3:
    23. bucket: image-registry-us-east-1-c92e88cad85b48ec8b312344dff03c82-392c
    24. region: us-east-1
    25. status:
    26. ...
  2. Edit the config/instance object:

    1. $ oc edit configs.imageregistry.operator.openshift.io/cluster
  3. Modify the spec section of the object to resemble the following YAML:

    1. spec:
    2. affinity:
    3. podAntiAffinity:
    4. preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
    5. - podAffinityTerm:
    6. namespaces:
    7. - openshift-image-registry
    8. topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
    9. weight: 100
    10. logLevel: Normal
    11. managementState: Managed
    12. nodeSelector:
    13. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
  4. Verify the registry pod has been moved to the infrastructure node.

    1. Run the following command to identify the node where the registry pod is located:

      1. $ oc get pods -o wide -n openshift-image-registry
    2. Confirm the node has the label you specified:

      1. $ oc describe node <node_name>

      Review the command output and confirm that node-role.kubernetes.io/infra is in the LABELS list.

Moving the router

You can deploy the router pod to a different machine set. By default, the pod is deployed to a worker node.

Prerequisites

  • Configure additional machine sets in your OKD cluster.

Procedure

  1. View the IngressController custom resource for the router Operator:

    1. $ oc get ingresscontroller default -n openshift-ingress-operator -o yaml

    The command output resembles the following text:

    1. apiVersion: operator.openshift.io/v1
    2. kind: IngressController
    3. metadata:
    4. creationTimestamp: 2019-04-18T12:35:39Z
    5. finalizers:
    6. - ingresscontroller.operator.openshift.io/finalizer-ingresscontroller
    7. generation: 1
    8. name: default
    9. namespace: openshift-ingress-operator
    10. resourceVersion: "11341"
    11. selfLink: /apis/operator.openshift.io/v1/namespaces/openshift-ingress-operator/ingresscontrollers/default
    12. uid: 79509e05-61d6-11e9-bc55-02ce4781844a
    13. spec: {}
    14. status:
    15. availableReplicas: 2
    16. conditions:
    17. - lastTransitionTime: 2019-04-18T12:36:15Z
    18. status: "True"
    19. type: Available
    20. domain: apps.<cluster>.example.com
    21. endpointPublishingStrategy:
    22. type: LoadBalancerService
    23. selector: ingresscontroller.operator.openshift.io/deployment-ingresscontroller=default
  2. Edit the ingresscontroller resource and change the nodeSelector to use the infra label:

    1. $ oc edit ingresscontroller default -n openshift-ingress-operator

    Add the nodeSelector stanza that references the infra label to the spec section, as shown:

    1. spec:
    2. nodePlacement:
    3. nodeSelector:
    4. matchLabels:
    5. node-role.kubernetes.io/infra: ""
  3. Confirm that the router pod is running on the infra node.

    1. View the list of router pods and note the node name of the running pod:

      1. $ oc get pod -n openshift-ingress -o wide

      Example output

      1. NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE IP NODE NOMINATED NODE READINESS GATES
      2. router-default-86798b4b5d-bdlvd 1/1 Running 0 28s 10.130.2.4 ip-10-0-217-226.ec2.internal <none> <none>
      3. router-default-955d875f4-255g8 0/1 Terminating 0 19h 10.129.2.4 ip-10-0-148-172.ec2.internal <none> <none>

      In this example, the running pod is on the ip-10-0-217-226.ec2.internal node.

    2. View the node status of the running pod:

      1. $ oc get node <node_name> (1)
      1Specify the <node_name> that you obtained from the pod list.

      Example output

      1. NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
      2. ip-10-0-217-226.ec2.internal Ready infra,worker 17h v1.24.0

      Because the role list includes infra, the pod is running on the correct node.

Infrastructure node sizing

Infrastructure nodes are nodes that are labeled to run pieces of the OKD environment. The infrastructure node resource requirements depend on the cluster age, nodes, and objects in the cluster, as these factors can lead to an increase in the number of metrics or time series in Prometheus. The following infrastructure node size recommendations are based on the results of cluster maximums and control plane density focused testing.

Number of worker nodesCPU coresMemory (GB)

25

4

16

100

8

32

250

16

128

500

32

128

In general, three infrastructure nodes are recommended per cluster.

These sizing recommendations are based on scale tests, which create a large number of objects across the cluster. These tests include reaching some of the cluster maximums. In the case of 250 and 500 node counts on an OKD 4.11 cluster, these maximums are 10000 namespaces with 61000 pods, 10000 deployments, 181000 secrets, 400 config maps, and so on. Prometheus is a highly memory intensive application; the resource usage depends on various factors including the number of nodes, objects, the Prometheus metrics scraping interval, metrics or time series, and the age of the cluster. The disk size also depends on the retention period. You must take these factors into consideration and size them accordingly.

These sizing recommendations are only applicable for the Prometheus, Router, and Registry infrastructure components, which are installed during cluster installation. Logging is a day-two operation and is not included in these recommendations.

In OKD 4.11, half of a CPU core (500 millicore) is now reserved by the system by default compared to OKD 3.11 and previous versions. This influences the stated sizing recommendations.

Additional resources