First, let’s discuss the hardware and software prerequisites of a Cloud Foundry installation.
Software:
1) 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, better in ISO format.
2) vSphere V4.1 or V5.x,
3) vSphere client
4) vCenter (installed on a Windows 2008 R2 64bit or a Windows 2003 server, physical or virtual machine)
Hardware:
Provided all nodes are VMs, the below table shows the number of VMs required:
| # of nodes | OS | can be physical machine | |
| BOSH CLI | 1 | Ubuntu | Y |
| vCenter+vSphere Client | 1 | Win2008 | Y, can be split into two nodes |
| micro BOSH | 1 | Ubuntu | N |
| BOSH | 6 | Ubuntu | N |
| Cloud Foundry | 34 | Ubuntu | N, see notes |
| Total: | 43 |
It should be noted that the number of nodes of Cloud Foundry in the above table reflects the minimum number of nodes required. This number may vary depending on the actual scale of a Cloud Foundry deployment. There are generally two rules to be considered when choosing of the hardware configuration:
1) The total number of vCPUs should not be more than twice the total number of physical cores. In a production system, this ratio should better be below 2.
2) The total memory of all VMs should be less than the physical memory of all hypervisors.
Here is an example configuration of hardware provided each VM has 4 GB memory and 1 vCPU (assume vCPU : CPU ratio is 1):
6 x servers, each has 8 CPU cores and 32GB RAM.
For an experimental system, we saw a successful deployment on a single server with the below configuration (assume each VM has 256 MB memory):
1 x server, 8 CPU cores and 16GB RAM
Besides the servers, storage is another key factor in a cloud platform. The storage should better have 200GB or more usable space to keep the images of all VMs. It is recommended the use of fast shared storage in a production system. NFS is the most commonly used protocol to share the storage between the hypervisors. In an experimental environment, a Linux-based NFS server can be used in lieu of a dedicated storage. Though local disks on hypervisors may work in a POC type environment, it is generally not recommended for any production system.
The last thing we should plan for is the network. In a lab environment, we could simply place all nodes on the same network. However, in a production system, components of Cloud Foundry should be properly allocated to various VLANs for security and management purposes. In this article series, we are not going into the details of networking. For illustration purpose, we will have five VLANs during our deployment:
| VLAN | Nodes |
| Management VLAN | Hypervisors and NFS storage |
| CF-internal VLAN | BOSH VMs and VMs of Cloud Foundry |
| CF VLAN | BOSH VMs, and VMs of cloud foundry |
| Service VLAN | For LB, dual-home routers |
| Public VLAN | For LB, incoming requests |
The installation of a Cloud Foundry instance has the following four parts:
1) Install the BOSH CLI tool in an Ubuntu 10.04 OS. This could be either a physical or virtual machine.
2) Install the micro BOSH. The micro BOSH is a VM that contains all components of BOSH. It has the same functions of a standard BOSH. However, it has limited disk space to store multiple releases. The purpose of having a micro BOSH is to install the BOSH, which is a distributed system itself.
3) Install BOSH by micro BOSH. BOSH usually consists of 6 VMs with each component resides on a node. One of the nodes called blobstore has a big disk size which can hold larger releases.
4) Install the Cloud Foundry instance by BOSH.
More blogs on installing Cloud Foundry using BOSH: