Deployment Examples

How to organize your UForge configuration depends on the specific customer needs. This may include:

  • The number of users as well as the number of simultaneous connections to the platform
  • The number of simultaneous generations
  • The number of projects in the project catalog
  • The SLA of UForge
  • Whether the service needs to be reached over multiple sites
  • Whether UForge is exposed to 3rd party customers and partners, or for internal use only

Note that UForge can be deployed on physical machines or on a virtual or cloud platform. The word ‘node’ describes either the specification of a physical machine or a virtual machine instance running in the virtual or cloud environment.

Mono Node Proof of Concept

If you want to set up a mono-node POC (Proof of Concept) you should have the following:

  • 10 CPU
  • 16 GB memory
  • 150 GB local hard drive (standard or SSD)
  • 300 GB local hard drive (for the generation processes). SSD is preferred for performance reasons.
  • 1 additional NAS or disk for user data (size will depend on user data, it will store the generated images and scans - 1 TB is typically sufficient for a POC)

Multi-node AppCenter

The minimum software topology is described in Minimum Software Topology. The following is an overall recommendation, assuming you are grouping the nodes.

Node RAM CPU Hard Drive Comment
DB/LDAP/OAR Secret Manager 10 GB 4 100 GB  
Web Service 6 GB 4 15 GB  
UI (portal) 3 GB 2 15 GB  
Compute Node (2 identical) 6 GB 4 15 GB + 500 GB SSD Alternative is 1 TB SSD NAS Shared between the 2 compute nodes. This storage could be upgraded if needed
NAS distributions     500 GB  
NAS user data     7 TB  

Note

The size of the user data NAS depends on the expected size of the user data

Network Topology

In order to optimize scalability, you should use a dedicated network subnet for UForge service.

If you want to deploy a public UForge service, you can use a public IP address for each component.

We recommend using a firewall with the NAT technology to map a public IP address to a private IP address. This allows you to use public IP addresses only for the Web Front-end and the Web Service. The other services stay hidden from the rest of the world.

For a private network, you can use a NAT translation, but it is better to use the firewall in gateway mode and filter the traffic. This way you can open ports on the different services.

By default UForge provides a proxy service, exposing the user interface (UI), REST web service tier and a download URL allowing external cloud platforms download generated machine images. This is configured automatically using the information you provide as part of the configuration phase (see Configuring UForge). These values can also be configured manually, for more information see Modifying the UForge Platform External URL Endpoints.

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Minimum Software Topology

For the minimum software topology, use all services without security or fault tolerance.

For each of these components we recommend the following minimal (hardware or virtual) specification:

Component RAM CPU Hard Drive Comment
Web Front-End 3 GB 2 15 GB  
Web Service 3 GB 2 15 GB  
Generation Cluster (scheduler) 2 GB 1 15 GB  
Compute Node 4 GB 2 30 GB With a good NAS/SAN you can reduce the disk space to 15 GB if you map the directory /space/REPOS with the NAS/SAN
SYNCOPE Webservice 2 GB 2 15 GB  
Database 4 GB 4 100 GB With a good NAS/SAN you can reduce the disk space to 15 GB if you map the directory /space/REPOS with the NAS/SAN
LDAP 2 GB 2 15 GB  
NAS/SAN 2 GB 2    

It may be more logical to group the DB, LDAP and Generation Cluster (scheduler) on one node. Typically you can also group the Webservice and SYNCOPE Webservice. Refer to Multi-node AppCenter

Note

When a user creates an appliance, the packages are stored locally in the UForge cache repository, which is stored on the DB. Therefore, depending on the number of appliances created and OS used, you may need to adjust the DB size.

Note

If you are using high availability and you choose to split the Webservice and SYNCOPE on separate nodes, then you need a shared NAS/SAN (/tmp/userdata).

Compute Node Hard Drive

In order to ensure best performance when generating machine images, it is recommended to use a local SSD. The size of the disk depends on the number of parallel image generations and the size of images. For example, if 4 generations of 60 GB Windows images are expected to run in parallel, disk size should be at least 240 GB.

NAS/SAN

The NAS/SAN is a storage area which will typically contain UForge Repository data, such as:

  • Operating system packages and updates
  • Project catalog binaries
  • User My Software binaries
  • Generated images from users using the platform
  • Data from user scans

Security Options

To increase the security of the UForge service, you can add replication in master/slave of the database component and the LDAP component.

The minimal requirement is 1 slave for the database and 1 slave for the LDAP service. Of course, you can add more slaves for each of these services.

See the specification of these options:

Component RAM CPU Hard Drive Comment
Database Slave 2 GB 1 70 GB With a good NAS/SAN you can reduce the disk space to 15 GB if you map the directory /var/lib/mysql to the NAS/SAN
LDAP Slave 1 GB 1 15 GB  

High Availability

High Availability can be attained with the redundancy of all services. However, the database and the LDAP service have not yet been tested with the clustering mode.

For the moment we recommend using the “security options” for these services. This is a point of failure.

All other services can be clustered. For clustering a service you will need a pool of load balancers (physical or virtual).

Component RAM CPU Hard Drive Comment
Load Balancer 2 GB 2 15 GB  

All other services keep the same configuration, as seen above.