EDA installation overview

This chapter describes the Nokia Event Driven Automation (EDA) components, the requirements for these components, and provides an overview of the installation process.

Deployment models

Nokia EDA is deployed on one, three, or more nodes (validated for up to six nodes). Nokia EDA is deployed as an application on virtual machine servers.

Networking for EDA nodes

This guide describes the deployment of EDA on a Kubernetes cluster with a single network, where access from both users and orchestrators to the UI and API, and access from EDA to the fabric (for example, SR Linux devices) go over the same interface.

It is possible to use two separate networks for the EDA nodes:
  • OAM network

    This interface is used to access the UI and the API of Nokia EDA. It is also through this network that the deployment tool reaches the nodes.

  • Fabric management network

    This interface is used to communicate with the management interfaces of the fabric (for example, SR Linux devices). This interface is where Nokia EDA exposes its DHCP and ZTP services.

For more information about this approach, contact your account team for related procedures. Additional steps are needed after the installation process.

EDA nodes

The Nokia EDA nodes are the VMware vSphere-based or KVM-based virtual machines (VMs) that host the Kubernetes environment on which the Nokia EDA application and Digital Sandbox are run.

These nodes run a hardened Talos Kubernetes environment. Talos is a secure, up-to-date and hardened platform for running Kubernetes.

EDA supports the following deployment models:

  • an environment with one node, which hosts only the Nokia EDA application for small scale deployments

  • an environment with three nodes or more nodes, which hosts only the Nokia EDA application

Requirements for deployment

This section describes the platform requirements, node requirements, and virtual IP requirements for deploying EDA.

Installation platform requirements

To execute the installation process, you need access to a Linux environment with the following components installed:

Table 1. Platform requirements
Component Requirement
Linux environment Any Linux distribution. The procedures provided in this document are validated on Ubuntu.
Container runtime: Docker

Docker must be running and you should be able to run containers
Tools
  • make
  • git
  • curl or wget
The following tools are also helpful. If they are not present, the installation tool downloads them later:
  • kubectl
  • helm
  • yq
  • k9s
  • kpt
Internet access Either directly or through a proxy

Nokia EDA node requirements

The Nokia EDA nodes are deployed as virtual machine servers. Node requirements summarizes the requirements of Nokia EDA nodes in KVM and VMware hypervisor.
Table 2. Node requirements
Component Requirement
CPU 32 vCPU on a modern x86-64 CPU
Memory 64GB
Storage
  • Operating system: 100GB of available SSD-based storage
  • Storage nodes: 300GB of available SSD-based storage on a separate virtual disk
Networking

  • at least one 10 Gbps NIC

  • the configured DNS servers must be reachable, functional, and able to resolve the hostnames used for the Nokia EDA nodes

  • Internet access directly or through a proxy

Virtualization platform You can run the Nokia EDA nodes as virtual machines using the following virtualization platforms:

  • operating system: VMware vSphere 7.0 or 8.0 or RHEL/Rocky

  • hypervisor: ESXi 7.0 or 8.0 or KVM

  • resource reservation for CPU, memory, and disks must be set to 100% for the Nokia EDA node virtual machines

Virtual IP requirements

The deployment requires two virtual IP addresses in the management network work:

  • Kubernetes VIP: the virtual IP address used by all the control plane nodes in the Kubernetes cluster.

  • Nokia EDA API/UI VIP: the virtual IP address used by the Nokia EDA API and UI.

Installation process overview

The installation consists of the following high-level tasks:

  1. Downloading the EDA Installation playground

    This task describes how to access the EDAADM tool and initiates the EDA installation playground for use during the installation. It also covers how to configure the playground.

  2. Download the Talos machine image

    This task describes how to download the Talos base image from the official Talos image factory for your environment.

  3. Preparing the EDAADM configuration file

    This task describes the details of the EDAADM configuration file and how to set it up.

  4. Generating the Talos machine configurations

    Using the EDA ADM tool and the configuration file, this task generates specific Talos machine configuration files for each Talos VM.

  5. Deploying the Talos virtual machines

    This task describes how to use the Talos base image and machine configuration files to deploy the Talos VMs in your KVM or VMware vSphere environment.

  6. Bootstrap the Talos Kubernetes cluster

    This task bootstraps the Talos Kubernetes environment using the VMs you have created.

  7. Installing the EDA application

    Using the EDA Installation playground, this step installs EDA on the Kubernetes environment in the EDA nodes.