Cluster Requirements¶
Overview¶
Prior to integrating Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) into the Azure Operator Nexus (AON) Cloud-Native Platform (CNP), review this document to ensure the required software components are installed and properly configured.
Software support¶
The CNFs and Kubernetes software versions listed below are the tested versions. F5 recommends to use CNFs 1.4.0 and above versions for better performance and installation experience.
| CNFs | Kubernetes |
|---|---|
| 2.0.0 | 1.30.x |
| 1.4.0 | 1.28.11 and 1.30.5 |
Note: The user can select only the Kubernetes version, the version of Mariner is determined by the version of Kubernetes.
Following table lists the Mariner versions used for respective Kubernetes versions.
| Kubernetes | Microsoft Linux |
|---|---|
| Versions '< 1.30 | 2.0 |
| Versions '>= 1.30' | 3.0 |
SR-IOV Support¶
All data-plane interfaces on AON K8s nodes are Mellanox CX6 virtual-functions assigned to the K8s node as interfaces. F5 recommends to use Nexus MACVLAN network plugin to deploy CNF on AON.
Note: On AON, f5-tmm is compatible with SR-IOV but f5ingress helm chart is not as it does not pass the appropriate resource pool identifiers back to the tmm-deployment.yaml file. Hence, SR-IOV cannot be used directly without modifying the tmm-deployment.yaml file.
Supported NICs¶
The following table lists the currently supported NICs.
| NICs | VF PCI IDs | Firmware |
|---|---|---|
| Mellanox ConnectX-6 | 15b3:101c | 26.33.1048 |
| Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx | 15b3:101e | 22.33.1048 |
| Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx | 15b3:101e | 26.33.1048 |
Driver requirements¶
While deploying the AON K8s cluster, enable huge pages as a configuration option as they are required for the optimal operation of CNFs. F5 recommends using the huge pages of size 2M, and a count sufficient to allow minimum 1GB allocation for each vCPU used by the CNF. For more information on configuring huge pages, see Create a Nexus Kubernetes cluster with a customized huge-page configuration.
Persistent Storage¶
AON/Nexus platform offers two forms of persistent storage. For more details on how to access these storage options, see Kubernetes storage classes.
Next step¶
Continue to the Getting Started guide to begin integrating CNFs.
Feedback¶
Provide feedback to improve this document by emailing cnfdocs@f5.com.