The following requirements must be met to use VMware Edge Compute Stack.

VMware Edge Compute Stack Host at the Edge Location

A VMware Edge Compute Stack host can be deployed at both, a physical server and a virtual machine. Running the Edge Compute Stack host as a virtual machine allows testing and CI/CD pipelines before deploying to physical servers.

  • 4 CPU cores

  • 16 GB RAM

  • 80 GB hard drive

  • 8 GB USB drive for initial provisioning of physical host or IPMI access to mount boot media

  • Virtual machine based deployment using:

    • VMware Workstation Pro

    • VMware Fusion

    • VMware vSphere

Network Requirements

Caution:

Placing an Edge Compute Stack host directly on the internet poses significant security risks and is not recommended for production environments. Edge Compute Stack hosts are critical edge infrastructure components, exposing them to the internet can make them vulnerable to various cyber threats, including unauthorized access, data breaches, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. An attacker gaining access to an Edge Compute Stack host could compromise all workloads running on it, leading to potential data loss, operational disruptions, and significant financial and reputational damage.

To mitigate these risks, Edge Compute Stack hosts should be placed behind a robust firewall and within a secure, isolated network segment. Access to the Edge Compute Stack host should be restricted to only trusted internal networks and connections to datacenter or cloud environments for workloads should be provided via Virtual Private Network (VPN) or a dedicated management network with strict access controls.

Requirements at the Edge location include:

  • DHCP networking for IP address allocation to the Edge Compute Stack host.

  • Non VLAN Tagged Management Network with network routing to the Edge Compute Stack service, Git and Application Registry Servers from the DHCP network.

The following are the network requirements for the current version of the Edge Compute Stack Host:

Component

Minimum Quantity

Required Configuration

Physical NIC

At least 1 physical NIC per host

Currently, the Edge Compute Stack host uses the same vSwitch but different port groups for Management and Workload networking.

DHCP or Static IP for Management traffic network

1

A DHCP address or Static IP is required for the Management network that is routable and has:

  • a git repository where the desired state configuration is stored.

  • content repositories for containers and virtual machine workloads.

DHCP or Static IP for Local Control Plane services

2

A DHCP or Static IP address is required for the Local Control Plane components.

DHCP or Static IP for Kubernetes worker node

1

The Kubernetes worker node is started automatically when Kubernetes workload manifests are added to the desired state repository. This worker node virtual machine requires a DHCP or Static IP address. By default, if a Kubernetes application is setup to use a NodePort, it uses this worker IP address.

Workload IP

x

All subsequent virtual machine workloads that are deployed require DHCP or static IP addresses.

NTP Server

At least 1

An NTP server that can be used for the host configuration.

Image Registry

At least 1

Access to a registry for deploying container workloads.

OVA Content HTTP/HTTPS Site

At least 1

Access to OVA content for deploying virtual machine workloads.

Firewall Rules

The following firewall rules are the minimum required for the Edge location to function correctly, "Edge Host IP's" referenced below currently includes the range of IP addresses set when configuring static IP information.

From

To

Rule

Port

Comments

Edge Host IP's

ecs-hostapi.orchestrator.vmware.com

Allow

443

Required for Edge host to communicate to the service

Edge Host IP's

Customer Git Server

Allow

443

Required for Edge host to pull desired state manifest files

Edge Host IP's

public.ecr.aws/h2g7q7w3/

Allow

443

Pull Edge Compute Stack updates from OCI Registry

Edge Host IP's

keswick-production-host-diagnostic-logs.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

Allow

443

S3 Bucket for storing support log bundles

Edge Host IP's

Customer HTTP/HTTPS OVA Web Server

Allow

80/443

Required to deploy VMs to the edge location

Edge Host Worker Node IP

Customer OCI Container Registry

Allow

443

Required to pull container workloads

Edge Host Worker Node IP

public.ecr.aws/h2g7q7w3/

Allow

443

Pull Edge Compute Stack default containers

Limitation

You can use a deployed Edge Compute Stack host for 60 days, after which all advanced features are locked. The active virtual machines continue to run, but you cannot start the powered off virtual machines. To remove this time limit you can purchase an Edge Compute Stack license by visiting the VMware Edge Compute Stack site.