Vitro Deployment Guide

Step-by-step guide to deploying Federal Frontier Vitro — prerequisites, hardware sizing, Kolla-Ansible deployment, and FMC registration.

This guide covers deploying a Federal Frontier Vitro environment from bare metal through workload cluster provisioning. The deployment sequence is: prepare hardware, deploy OpenStack via Kolla-Ansible, deploy the Fleet Management Cluster, register with FKP, and provision workload clusters via CAPO.

Prerequisites

Hardware

Vitro requires a minimum of 3 bare-metal servers for a converged (HCI) deployment with Ceph storage and OpenStack HA.

Component Minimum (3-node HCI) Recommended (Production)
Servers 3 5+ (separate control/compute)
CPU per server 16 cores 32+ cores
RAM per server 128 GB 256+ GB
OS disk 480 GB SSD 960 GB SSD (mirrored)
Ceph OSD disks 2x 1 TB NVMe per server 4x 2 TB NVMe per server
Network 2x 25 GbE (bond) 2x 25 GbE + 2x 100 GbE (storage)
Management 1 GbE IPMI/iDRAC/iLO Same

Validated hardware: Dell PowerEdge R750, Dell PowerEdge R660, HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10+.

Network

Network Purpose VLAN Subnet (example)
Management IPMI, SSH, Ansible VLAN 10 192.168.10.0/24
Provider OpenStack external/floating IPs VLAN 20 10.10.0.0/24
Tenant VM-to-VM traffic (OVN geneve) VLAN 30 Auto (OVN managed)
Storage Ceph replication traffic VLAN 40 192.168.40.0/24
API OpenStack API endpoints VLAN 50 192.168.50.0/24

Software

Component Version
Host OS Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Python 3.10+
Docker 24.0+
Kolla-Ansible Dalmatian (2024.2)
Ansible 2.16+ (ansible-core)

Air-Gap Preparation

For air-gapped deployments, pre-stage all required artifacts:

  1. Kolla container images — pull all images on a connected system, export as tarballs, transfer to air-gapped registry (Harbor)
  2. RKE2 node images — build with Packer including all CNI images pre-cached
  3. Python packages — create an offline pip repository for Kolla-Ansible and dependencies
  4. OS packages — mirror Ubuntu 22.04 repository for the air-gapped network

Deployment Steps

Step 1: Prepare Hosts

Install Ubuntu 22.04 on all servers. Configure networking, NTP, and SSH access for Ansible.

# On each host:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip docker.io open-iscsi nfs-common

# Enable Docker
sudo systemctl enable --now docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

# Configure NTP (critical for Ceph and Keystone)
sudo timedatectl set-ntp true

Step 2: Deploy Kolla-Ansible

From the deployment host (can be one of the control nodes or a separate bastion):

# Install Kolla-Ansible
pip install kolla-ansible==2024.2

# Generate configuration
kolla-ansible install-deps
cp -r /usr/share/kolla-ansible/etc_examples/kolla /etc/kolla
kolla-genpwd

# Edit globals.yml for your environment
# Key settings:
#   kolla_internal_vip_address: <API VIP>
#   network_interface: <management NIC>
#   neutron_external_interface: <provider NIC>
#   enable_ceph: "yes"
#   enable_ceph_rgw: "yes"
#   enable_octavia: "yes"
#   openstack_release: "2024.2"

# Edit inventory for your hosts
vim /etc/kolla/inventory

# Bootstrap servers
kolla-ansible -i /etc/kolla/inventory bootstrap-servers

# Pre-deployment checks
kolla-ansible -i /etc/kolla/inventory prechecks

# Deploy
kolla-ansible -i /etc/kolla/inventory deploy

# Post-deploy (generates admin-openrc.sh)
kolla-ansible -i /etc/kolla/inventory post-deploy

Step 3: Verify OpenStack

# Source admin credentials
source /etc/kolla/admin-openrc.sh

# Verify services
openstack service list
openstack compute service list
openstack network agent list
openstack volume service list

# Verify Ceph
sudo docker exec ceph_mon ceph -s
# Expect: HEALTH_OK or HEALTH_WARN with known warnings

Step 4: Deploy Fleet Management Cluster

The FMC runs RKE2 directly on bare metal — not on OpenStack VMs. It can share hardware with the Vitro control plane or run on dedicated servers.

# On the first FMC node:
curl -sfL https://get.rke2.io | INSTALL_RKE2_TYPE="server" sh -
systemctl enable --now rke2-server

# Get kubeconfig
mkdir -p ~/.kube
cp /etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml ~/.kube/config
chmod 600 ~/.kube/config

# Install Helm
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

# Install ArgoCD
kubectl create namespace argocd
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Step 5: Register with FKP

# Install CAPO (Cluster API Provider OpenStack)
clusterctl init --infrastructure openstack

# Create cloud-config secret for OpenStack credentials
kubectl create secret generic cloud-config \
  --from-file=clouds.yaml=/etc/openstack/clouds.yaml \
  -n capo-system

# Apply the CAPO MachineTemplate for workload clusters
kubectl apply -f deploy/overlays/fmc/capo-clusters/

Step 6: Provision Workload Clusters

# Example: workload-cluster-1.yaml
apiVersion: cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: workload-1
  namespace: default
spec:
  clusterNetwork:
    pods:
      cidrBlocks: ["10.244.0.0/16"]
    services:
      cidrBlocks: ["10.96.0.0/12"]
  infrastructureRef:
    apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha7
    kind: OpenStackCluster
    name: workload-1
  controlPlaneRef:
    apiVersion: controlplane.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
    kind: RKE2ControlPlane
    name: workload-1-control-plane

# Apply via ArgoCD (preferred) or kubectl
kubectl apply -f workload-cluster-1.yaml

# Monitor provisioning
kubectl get clusters,machines,openstackmachines -A

Post-Deployment

After deployment, register the Vitro environment with the F3Iai agent platform:

  1. Deploy MCP servers (OpenStack, Kolla, Ceph) in the f3iai namespace
  2. Register the MCP servers as forwards in Remuda
  3. Configure HyperSync CronJobs for continuous FFO population
  4. Verify data appears in CompassAI Explorer and the OutpostAI chatbot