System requirements

Node requirements

• AMD64 processor

• Linux kernel 3.10 or later with required dependencies. The following distributions have the required kernel, its dependencies, and are known to work well with Calico and OpenStack.

  • RedHat Linux 7
  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • CentOS 7

Key/value store

Calico master requires a key/value store accessible by all Calico components. If you don’t already have an etcdv3 cluster to connect to, we provide instructions in the installation documentation.

Network requirements

Ensure that your hosts and firewalls allow the necessary traffic based on your configuration.

* If your compute hosts connect directly and don’t use IP-in-IP, you don’t need to allow IP-in-IP traffic.

OpenStack requirements

We aim to develop and maintain the Neutron driver for Calico (networking-calico) so that its master code works with OpenStack master or any previous release (back to Icehouse), on any operating system, independently of the deployment mechanism that is used to install it.

However, we recommend using OpenStack Newton or later, and our active support and testing of Calico master with OpenStack is limited to the following versions:

• Ocata
• Pike

Kernel dependencies

Tip: If you are using one of the recommended distributions, you will already satisfy these.

• nf_conntrack_netlink subsystem
• ip_tables (for IPv4)
• ip6_tables (for IPv6)
• ip_set
• xt_set
• ipt_set
• ipt_rpfilter
• ipt_REJECT
• ipip (if using Calico networking)

Nova patch needed with Mitaka and earlier

With OpenStack Mitaka and earlier, and if your libvirt is >= 1.3.3 and < 3.1, you will need to patch the Nova code post installation, on each compute host, as in this change. In case you need the same Nova code to work with all possible libvirt versions, you should then add this further change. OpenStack Newton and later already include these two changes.