Installation Preparation and Prerequisites

The following are the prerequisites for deploying a Lightbits storage cluster.

• An Azure subscription from which the Marketplace offer is deployed. Note that some pay-as-you-go subscriptions might have limitations that will not enable the deployment of the Lightbits SDS on Azure deployment.
• You must have permissions to deploy the managed application. It is recommended to run with a few Contributor roles on the subscription. Please note that there are other roles that include the above role; for example, the Contributor role. See the full list of roles here: Minimum Required Permissions.
• A resource group where the managed application will be deployed (existing). If you have permission to create a new resource group, you can do this during the deployment.
• Although it is possible to create a new Vnet during cluster deployment, it is recommended to deploy the Lightbits cluster within an existing Vnet (on its own dedicated subnet) - where the existing clients using the storage exist in order to minimize cost of Vnet peering and the impact of networking performance in Vnet peering.

• A user managed identity with the role of Network Contributor on the Vnet, which you will use for the cluster.
• A \24 dedicated subnet with continuous address space.
• An existing SSH key. For the deployment, we need the public key. You should always keep the private key safe.
• The Lightbits cluster should have outbound internet/Azure API connectivity (usually this is on the Vnet or subnet level). If you have an NSG or other firewall blocking the outbound HTTPS connection on 443, these should be opened. Deployment will fail if there is no connectivity to Azure APIs. The minimum is a destinations-based rule to the Azure Cloud service tag (this will enable outbound traffic but is limited only to required Azure services, such as Azure APIs). The following screenshot is from the network security group, but most cloud-based firewalls also support the same Azure service tags.

The subscription should have enough quota to deploy the amount of required vCPUs in the region, and specifically for the LSv3 type in the selected region:

1. Go to the Azure portal and search for Quotas.
2. Filter by LSv3 or LASv3, based on the server type you want to deploy in the preferred region. You should have at least X number of available vCPUs (where X is the number of instances multiplied by the number of vCPUs on the selected instances). So for a basic cluster running on L32Sv3 with 32 vCPUs and three nodes in the cluster, you will need 96 available vCPUs.

Or

In addition, you should also have the same amount of available vCPUs on Total Regional vCPUs for the selected region:

Verify that you can deploy various resources required by the Lightbits cluster on Azure deployment, such as Microsoft.KeyVault and Microsoft.Storage

1. Go to the Azure portal and search for Subscription.
2. Select the subscription that you are planning to deploy from.
3. From the left menu, select Resource Provider.
4. The filter for KeyVault should be marked as registered. If not, click Register to do the same for Microsoft.Storage before you deploy the Marketplace.