Hardware requirements for witness node

Harvester
1

With v1.3.0 Harvester now supports creating cluster with 2 nodes with Witness nodes.

Requirements for nodes are published here:

  • 16 cores
  • 64GB RAM
  • 500 GB of disc with 5000 IOPS
  • 10Gbps Ethernet

Does same hardware requirements apply to Witness node? If not - what’s are the requirements?

2

Welcome!

Witness nodes just run etcd - they don’t run workloads - so do not need to be as powerful as “regular” Harvester nodes. The third paragraph of the first link you posted notes that the hardware recommendations for etcd - Hardware recommendations | etcd - should be considered.

You may find the recording of a recent Global Online Meetup of Harvester where they featured version 1.3.0 - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7KYSJkA0Sc . In particular the witness node feature was discussed at around 31:40.

3

Thank you.

Checking these links, the summary:

  • 2 cores
  • 8GB RAM
  • 50+ sequential IOPS. Prefer SSD
  • 1Gbps Ethernet
4

Was installing it today and found that any node must have at least 250GB of disc space:

Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 15.46.54
Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 15.46.541448×796 45.7 KB

5

Ah they haven’t reduced the minimum disk requirement for the witness node role. I’ll submit an issue on that referencing this thread.

It might be possible to override that check during install - see PXE Boot Installation | Harvester - although I don’t know if that applies to storage.

6

I think this issue is relevant:

7

Good find (and saved me a job)!