Manually installing the RHEL OS for the NSP

RHEL OS installation requirements
CAUTION 

CAUTION

Upgrade Failure

The NSP system locale must remain unchanged after the initial system installation; otherwise, a system upgrade fails. Also, in an NSP system that includes the NFM-P, the NSP and NFM-P locales must match.

Ensure that you set the system locale on a component only before NSP software installation, and not afterward.

CAUTION 

CAUTION

Risk of excessive resource consumption

The RHEL gnome desktop may consume excessive memory and result in system performance degradation.

The NSP does not require the gnome desktop, which is provided for customer and support convenience. It is recommended that you disable the gnome desktop in each RHEL OS instance in an NSP deployment if you do not require the gnome desktop.

You can stop the gnome desktop using the following command as the root user:

systemctl stop gdm ↵

To disable the gnome desktop so that it does not start after a reboot, enter the following as the root user:

systemctl disable gdm ↵

CAUTION 

CAUTION

Deployment Failure

NSP software deployment may fail if the RHEL OS configuration includes a parameter setting that the NSP does not support.

Each RHEL OS configuration setting for an NSP component must remain at the default unless otherwise specified in the NSP documentation.

Each NSP VM or physical station requires a specifically configured base OS environment and set of RHEL OS packages that are described in this section.

Note: A manually installed RHEL OS instance for an NSP component must be established as described in this section; otherwise, NSP component deployment on the OS fails.

Note: After you successfully install an NSP RHEL OS instance, you can optionally install one or more packages listed in Optional RHEL OS packages.

Installing the OS packages

The procedures and examples in the NSP documentation use the RHEL dnf utility to orchestrate RHEL OS package installation and management.

If an OS package has dependencies on any additional packages that are not listed in the package documentation, the dnf utility installs the packages to resolve the dependencies.

dnf installs packages from RHEL ISO images or package repositories. A package repository is one of the following:

See the RHEL documentation for information about setting up a dnf repository.

Note: dnf uses the RHEL rpm utility, which requires hardware driver files in binary format. If the RHEL driver files provided by your server hardware vendor are in source rpm format, you may need to install additional packages in order to compile the files into binary format. See the station hardware documentation for information.

Using dnf

You can use one dnf command to install or uninstall multiple OS packages. If you do not specify the -y option shown in the command examples below, dnf prompts you before installing or uninstalling each package.

The package installation syntax is:

dnf -y install package_1 package_2 ... package_n

The package uninstallation syntax is:

dnf -y remove package_1 package_2 ... package_n

Required RHEL 8 swappiness workaround

As noted by Red Hat, the RHEL 8 swappiness setting is ineffective. Special configuration is required to resolve the issue on a manually installed RHEL OS instance. Red Hat provides corrective steps that you must perform on any manually installed RHEL OS instance that is designated to host any of the following NSP components:

Note: You must apply the RHEL workaround before you attempt to deploy any NSP software on the OS instance.

To apply the RHEL 8 swappiness workaround describes how to apply the workaround, which configures the RHEL OS to use cgroups v2 rather than v1.