System requirements

3 MINUTE READ

Node requirements

  • x86-64 processor

  • Linux kernel 3.10 or later with required dependencies. The following distributions have the required kernel, its dependencies, and are known to work well with Calico and OpenStack.
    • RedHat Linux 7
    • Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04
    • CentOS 7

  • Calico must be able to manage cali* interfaces on the host. When IPIP is enabled (the default), Calico also needs to be able to manage tunl* interfaces. When VXLAN is enabled, Calico also needs to be able to manage the vxlan.calico interface.

    Note: Many Linux distributions, such as most of the above, include NetworkManager. By default, NetworkManager does not allow Calico to manage interfaces. If your nodes have NetworkManager, complete the steps in Preventing NetworkManager from controlling Calico interfaces before installing Calico.

Key/value store

Calico v3.15 requires a key/value store accessible by all Calico components. For production you will likely want multiple nodes for greater performance and reliability. If you don’t already have an etcdv3 cluster to connect to, please refer to the upstream etcd docs for detailed advice and setup.

Network requirements

Ensure that your hosts and firewalls allow the necessary traffic based on your configuration.

Configuration Host(s) Connection type Port/protocol
Calico networking (BGP) All Bidirectional TCP 179
Calico networking with IP-in-IP enabled (default) All Bidirectional IP-in-IP, often represented by its protocol number 4
Calico networking with VXLAN enabled All Bidirectional UDP 4789
Calico networking with Typha enabled Typha agent hosts Incoming TCP 5473 (default)
flannel networking (VXLAN) All Bidirectional UDP 4789
All kube-apiserver host Incoming Often TCP 443 or 6443*
etcd datastore etcd hosts Incoming Officially TCP 2379 but can vary

* If your compute hosts connect directly and don’t use IP-in-IP, you don’t need to allow IP-in-IP traffic.

Privileges

Ensure that Calico has the CAP_SYS_ADMIN privilege.

The simplest way to provide the necessary privilege is to run Calico as root or in a privileged container.

OpenStack requirements

We aim to develop and maintain the Neutron driver for Calico (networking-calico) so that its master code works with OpenStack master or any previous release (back to Liberty), on any operating system, independently of the deployment mechanism that is used to install it. However, we recommend using OpenStack Newton or later.

Specific platform notes

Active testing

Our active testing of Calico v3.15 with OpenStack is with the following releases and platforms:

Python version OpenStack release OS platform
Python 2 Queens Ubuntu 18.04
Python 2 Rocky CentOS 7
Python 3 Ussuri Ubuntu 18.04

Live migration with Train and later

Live migration with Train and later OpenStack releases requires live_migration_wait_for_vif_plug to be set to false in nova.conf, on all compute nodes.

Nova patch needed with Mitaka and earlier

With OpenStack Mitaka and earlier, and if your libvirt is >= 1.3.3 and < 3.1, you will need to patch the Nova code post installation, on each compute host, as in this change. In case you need the same Nova code to work with all possible libvirt versions, you should then add this further change. OpenStack Newton and later already include these two changes.

Kernel dependencies

Tip: If you are using one of the recommended distributions, you will already satisfy these.

  • ip_set
  • ip_tables (for IPv4)
  • ip6_tables (for IPv6)
  • ipt_REJECT
  • ipt_rpfilter
  • ipt_set
  • nf_conntrack_netlink subsystem
  • nf_conntrack_proto_sctp
  • sctp
  • xt_addrtype
  • xt_comment
  • xt_conntrack
  • xt_icmp (for IPv4)
  • xt_icmp6 (for IPv6)
  • xt_ipvs
  • xt_mark
  • xt_multiport
  • xt_rpfilter
  • xt_sctp
  • xt_set
  • xt_u32
  • ipip (if using Calico networking)