Operating System Installation

Supported Operating Systems

SwiftStack Controller On-Premises Software supports the following Linux operating systems:

• Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, or 7.9 Server 64-bit
• CentOS 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, or 7.9 Server 64-bit

The SwiftStack Controller On-Premises can be installed on a bare metal or virtual server. SSD-backed storage is recommended to meet the IOPS requirements for storing time-series metrics data. (Note: SwiftStack Controller On-Premises is not supported in a Docker, LXD or other type of container)

Note

RHEL/CentOS 7.1 is no longer fully supported; existing 7.1 controllers may be upgraded to a later point release of RHEL/CentOS 7.x.

A clean installation using the standard ISO of the supported operating systems should be used. SwiftStack tests and verifies Controller installations using the standard ISO from the supported operating system vendors.

We recommend you install the firewalld package (the controller will automatically configure it during installation and later during post-install setup). If you don't want any firewall for the controller, please ensure the firewalld and iptables-services RPMs are not installed.

You can create a non-root user if you want, but all manual controller maintenance operations will require superuser privileges. So we recommend just using the root user.

A standby controller must be able to accept incoming SSH connections for the ss-carbon user. The SSH connection will only be allowed to execute a secured version of rsync in order to copy time-series metric files and controller backup files from the primary controller to the standby controller. Therefore, you may need to add ss-carbon to any existing AllowUsers or AllowGroups directives in the standby controller /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.