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Further Considerations

System Compatibility

Simplyblock contains two major components, the control plane and the storage plane.

  • For the control plane, simplyblock requires x86-64 (AMD64 / Intel 64) compatible CPUs.
  • For the storage plane, simplyblock supports x86-64 (AMD64 / Intel 64) or ARM64 (AArch64) compatible CPUs.

Info

A single storage plane cluster can be set up from both x86-64 and ARM64 CPUs. However, simplyblock recommends to build a storage plane from a single CPU architecture. This is especially important to consider when running hyper-converged or in a hybrid setup.

In terms of operating system, simplyblock requires a Red Hat-based Linux distribution version 9 (including Rocky Linux and Alma Linux) for the control plane nodes and disaggregated storage nodes (docker-swarm) and recommends a Linux kernel 5.9 or later.

For storage nodes running in Kubernetes, any Linux distribution (RHEL-based, Debian-based, Talos) can be used. For more information, see the supported Linux Distributions Matrix.

For any client host, the nvme-tcp module must be loaded and support NVMe Multipathing ⧉.

Storage Considerations

Simplyblock is an NVMe-first storage architecture and requires NVMe device with exclusive access. Simplyblock does not support individual partitions, but requires full and exclusive access to the physical or virtual NVMe device.