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Containerization requirements and limitations

This section describes the requirements for deploying HCL Digital Experience 9.5 images to container platforms. You can also find current limitations.

Attention

Beginning with HCL Digital Experience 9.5 Container Update CF200, HCL discontinued releasing the HCL Digital Experience (DX) Operator-based deployments and provides support only for Helm-based deployments. HCL plans no further updates or code fixes for the operator-based deployments. Customers must migrate to Helm-based deployments for their DX installations. HCL will work with customers as they transition from operator-based to Helm-based deployments. For more information on the migration process, see Migrating from Operator-based to Helm-based deployments.

Consult the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 Support Statements on the HCL DX Support pages for the latest updates on supported platforms, components, and release levels.

Requirements for supported file systems

Your environment must meet the following file-system requirements: - DX requires two ReadWriteMany volumes: - One volume for Core. - One volume for Digital Asset Management. - All the other pods require ReadWriteOnce volumes. - DX is input-output (I/O) intensive and requires a high-performance file system for optimization. - A persistence-node relies on PostgreSQL, which requires the use of hard links. Storage systems (like Azure Files) that do not support hard links cannot be used. For more information, see the Microsoft documentation for features not supported by the Azure File service. - All DX applications require the use of symbolic links and soft links. Storage systems must support the use of symbolic links and soft links. If you use Azure Files, you must enable mountOptions settings of the StorageClass by using mfsymlinks. For more information, see the Microsoft documentation on troubleshooting Azure Files on Linux (SMB). - You can configure volume sizes individually per volume and these depend on the respective usage. For more information, see the following Help Center topics: - Configuring PVCs in a Helm deployment - Customizing the container for Operator-based deployments

Requirements and limitations for Helm-based deployments

This section describes the requirements and limitations for HCL Digital Experience 9.5 Container Update CF200 and later deployments that use Helm.

HCL DX 9.5 CF200 and later is designed to run on any certified Kubernetes platform (https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance), provided that the conditions apply:

For the list of Kubernetes versions that are tested and supported by HCL, refer to the HCL DX supported hardware and software statements page.

Although the platforms might be Certified Kubernetes platforms, you might find the environments vary slightly depending on the vendors. HCL Support will make a reasonable effort to assist the customer in problem resolution in scenarios where the Kubernetes version is still under support by the vendor. If there are any unresolved issues, HCL Support will provide alternative implementation recommendations or open Feature Requests for the problem scenario.

Internally, HCL tests DX against a range of Kubernetes platforms that is regularly reviewed and updated. HCL does not test with every single platform vendor, but aims to cover a representative sample of popular Kubernetes implementations. See the HCL DX supported hardware and software statements on the HCL Support Knowledge Base for additional details.

To deploy HCL Digital Experience 9.5 CF200 to the supported Kubernetes platforms that use Helm, the following elements are required:

  • Helm installation:

    Download and install Helm to your target environment. The HCL DX 9.5 CF200 and later container deployment is tested and is supported with Helm v3. For more information regarding the supported Helm version for individual Kubernetes versions, refer to Helm documentation.

  • Migration:

    For information about migrating from operator-based to Helm-based deployments, see Migrating from Operator-based to Helm-based deployments.

  • Container platform capacity resource requirements:

The following table outlines the minimum possible amount of resource requests by the HCL DX 9.5 container components in Helm-based deployments and the minimum number of pods required for each component.

To use the minimal configuration, adjust the resource requests in your custom-values.yaml file accordingly. You can use alternatives to these numbers. Increasing any number is not an issue. In fact, for best results in a production environment, increase these numbers to scale to your specific needs. You can also decrease some of these numbers and still be able to start DX (for example, for deployment environments), but this action is not officially supported.

All the following CPU sizings relate to an environment with 2nd generation Intel Xeon scalable processors (Cascade Lake 8223CL) or 1st generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake 8124M) processors.

Note

Every Kubernetes node requires some memory for Kubernetes-specific services. Ensure that your Kubernetes Node has enough capacity to host both the Kubernetes services and HCL DX. The overall requested amount of resources might vary based on disabled and enabled applications.

Pod name Minimum number of Pods Container Container Image Container CPU request and limit Container Memory request and limit
core 1 core core 4000m 6144Mi
system-out-log logging-sidecar 100m 64Mi
system-err-log logging-sidecar 100m 64Mi
prereqs-checker prereqs-checker 100m 64Mi
content-composer 1 content-composer content-composer 100m 128Mi
dam-plugin-google-vision 1 dam-plugin-google-vision dam-plugin-google-vision 100m 384Mi
dam-plugin-kaltura 1 dam-plugin-kaltura dam-plugin-kaltura 100m 128Mi
digital-asset-management 1 digital-asset-management digital-asset-manager 500m 1512Mi
prereqs-checker prereqs-checker 100m 64Mi
haproxy 1 haproxy haproxy 200m 300Mi
image-processor 1 image-processor image-processor 200m 2048Mi
license-manager 1 license-manager license-manager 100m 300Mi
open-ldap 1 ldap openldap 200m 768Mi
persistence-connection-pool 1 persistence-connection-pool persistence-connection-pool 500m 512Mi
persistence-node 1 persistence-node persistence-node 500m 1024Mi
persistence-metrics-exporter persistence-metrics-exporter 100m 128Mi
persistence-repmgr-log logging-sidecar 100m 64Mi
prereqs-checker prereqs-checker 100m 64Mi
remote-search 1 remote-search remote-search 500m 2048Mi
system-out-log logging-sidecar 100m 64Mi
system-err-log logging-sidecar 100m 64Mi
prereqs-checker prereqs-checker 100m 64Mi
ring-api 1 ring-api ringapi 100m 256Mi
runtime-controller 1 runtime-controller runtime-controller 100m 256Mi
Overall 8200m 16512Mi

Important

For the recommended disk storage per PersistentVolume, refer to the values.yaml file. The relevant values can be found in the volumes section of the values.yaml file in the requests.storage parameter of each Volume. Note that the required size increases with every core upgrade from one cumulative fix to another. For best results, clean up your previous profiles after you confirm that the new profile is working. See related Core Profile Check and Storage Space Check.

Note

The overall sums for CPU and memory include all components of HCL DX. In most cases, you only want to deploy a subset of all components. Therefore, the minimal system requirements decrease accordingly.

Prereqs Checker For DX Deployment

HCL DX introduced a tool called Prereqs Checker that runs a number of checks to confirm whether the prerequisites for various components are met.

You can get the result of these checks from the container logs of the prereqs-checker container in the pod where Prereqs Checker is installed. For more information, see Configure Prereqs Checker For DX Deployment.

For these checks, one separate sidecar container is deployed with the main application container. This is a lightweight container so the main application performance is not affected.

The main objective of the Prereqs Checker is to learn whether the specified prerequisites are met and to inform users about the result in the logs, that is, if the checks have passed or failed. You can also use the tool to check basic information about the file system of the mounted volumes, which helps track issues related to the file systems.

Starting CF213, Core Profile Check is introduced to check whether the file system has the minimum storage capacity available for upgrade. You can print the logs of the Prereqs Checker to see whether the check passed or failed. For best results, clean up the previous profile if the check failed before upgrading.