Nest System Requirements
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To learn about Nest and its components, see Nest.
Instances
A production Nest deployment consists of 3 instances spread across availability zones for high availability. See the Reference Architecture for a recommended layout.
TIP
You can start with a single instance for trials or small environments. A single instance is fully functional but does not provide high availability. For HA, a minimum of 3 instances is required (etcd needs an odd-number quorum).
Sizing
The number of hosted Kubernetes control planes a Nest can run depends on the hardware. The following tiers cover typical deployments:
| Small (up to 10 clusters) | Medium (up to 25 clusters) | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 2x 16C/32T | 2x 32C/64T |
| Memory | 256 GB | 512 GB |
| Boot Disk | 2x 960 GB NVMe (mirrored) | 2x 960 GB NVMe (mirrored) |
| etcd Disk | 2x 1.92 TB NVMe (mirrored) | 2x 1.92 TB NVMe (mirrored) |
These specifications are per instance.
The Boot Disk carries the OS and the container images. The etcd Disk is the dedicated disk that etcd and other persistent volumes are moved to. Both are selected during Disk Setup, where each can optionally be mirrored across two disks (RAID1).
etcd Disk Performance
Each hosted control plane runs a dedicated etcd instance on the Nest. etcd is highly sensitive to disk latency. Use fast NVMe drives for the etcd disks and do not use hardware RAID controllers. The Nest installer configures software RAID instead.
Network
See Network Requirements (self-hosted) for the full network requirements.