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NetApp Solutions

Anthos on bare metal

Contributors kevin-hoke
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Benefits

The hardware-agnostic capabilities of Anthos on bare metal allow you to select a compute platform optimized for your personalized use case and also provide many additional benefits.

Examples include the following:

  • Bring your own server. You can use servers that match your existing infrastructure to reduce capital expenditure and management costs.

  • Bring your own Linux OS. By choosing the Linux OS that you wish to deploy your Anthos-on-bare-metal environment to, you can ensure that the Anthos environment fits neatly into your existing infrastructure and management schemes.

  • Improved performance and lowered cost. Without the requirement of a hypervisor, Anthos-on-bare-metal clusters call for direct access to server hardware resources, including performance-optimized hardware devices like GPUs.

  • Improved network performance and lowered latency. Because the Anthos-on-bare-metal server nodes are directly connected to your network without a virtualized abstraction layer, they can be optimized for low latency and performance.

Hardware requirements

Compute

Google Cloud periodically requests updated validation of partner server platforms with new releases of Anthos through their Anthos Ready platform partner program. A listing of currently validated server platforms and the versions of Anthos supported can be found here.

The following table contains server platforms that have been tested by NetApp and NetApp partner engineers for the validation of Anthos on bare metal deployments.

Manufacturer

Make

Model

Cisco

UCS

B200 M5

HPE

Proliant

DL360

Operating System

Anthos-on-bare-metal nodes can be configured with several different Linux distributions as chosen by the customer to help match their current datacenter infrastructure.

The following table contains a list of Linux operating systems that have been used by NetApp and our partners to validate the solution.

Operating System Release Anthos Versions

CentOS

8.4.2105

1.14

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

8.4

1.14

Ubuntu

18.04.5 LTS (with kernel 5.4.0-81-generic)

1.14

Ubuntu

20.04.2 LTS

1.14

Additional hardware

To complete the deployment of Anthos on bare metal as a fully validated solution, additional data center components for networking and storage have been tested by NetApp and our partner engineers.

The following table includes information about these additional infrastructure components.

Manufacturer Hardware Name Model

Cisco

Nexus

C9336C-FX2

NetApp

AFF

A250, A220

Additional software

The following table includes a list of additional software versions deployed in the validation environment.

Manufacturer Software name Version

Cisco

NXOS

9.3(5)

NetApp

ONTAP

9.11.1P4

NetApp

Astra Trident

23.01.0

During the Anthos Ready platform validation performed by NetApp and our partner team at World Wide Technology (WWT), the lab environment was built based on the following diagram, which allowed us to test the functionality of each server type, operating system, the network devices, and storage systems deployed in the solution.

Anthos BareMetal Physical Hardware Diagram

Anthos BareMetal logical Network Diagram

Note This multi-OS environment shows interoperability with supported OS versions for the Anthos-on-bare-metal solution. We anticipate that customers will standardize on one or a subset of operating systems for their deployment.

Infrastructure support resources

The following infrastructure should be in place prior to the deployment of Anthos on bare metal:

  • At least one DNS server that provides a full host-name resolution accessible from the management network.

  • At least one NTP server that is accessible from the management network.

  • (Optional) Outbound internet connectivity for both the in-band management network.

Note There is a demo video of an Anthos on bare metal deployment in the Videos and Demos section of this document.