Skip to content

Installation Options

Prelude Netork Automation Stack

Prelude automation software is built on following components:

  • OneBoard is mainly the UI interface the user has access to.
  • Gateway serves as a gateway to the devices for different purposes, presently mostly used for ZTP feature and software upgrades.
  • Cisco NSO is Cisco Network Service Orchestrator Software

Info

Above components are provided as separated Docker containers

Hosting Prelude application

For security purposes, Prelude can support up to three airgap spaces :

  • The user space: where users can connect to Prelude OneBoard web UI.
  • The internal space: this space provides internal connectivity between Prelude components.
  • The device space: this space provides connectivity to network devices in the field.

The following installation options explains, how to set up Prelude with one to three spaces.

Option 1 - Single Space option

In its simplest form (Lab for example), all the spaces can be merged into a single network as described in the picture below:

Prelude install option 1

In this option all the components can be installed on a single host.

Installation instructions for option 1

Requirements

  • vCPUs: 32
  • RAM: 64GB
  • Disk: 500GB

Option 2 - Two Spaces option

Typical installation in a production network comes with a separation between the management and the user subnets. In this option, the user space and the internal space are merged. All Internal communications are using the northbound interface.

Prelude install option 2

In this option all the components can be installed on a single host.

Installation instructions for option 2

Requirements

  • vCPUs: 32
  • RAM: 64GB
  • Disk: 500GB

Option 3 - Three Spaces option

An even more secure way of doing things is to keep all three spaces separates as follows:

Prelude install option 3

In this option all the components have to be installed on two different hosts.

Installation instructions for option 3

Prelude OneBoard requirements

  • vCPUs: 12
  • RAM: 16GB
  • Disk: 500GB

Prelude Foundation requirements

  • vCPUs: 32
  • RAM: 64GB
  • Disk: 200GB

Tip

If you want to keep Prelude instances even more secure, we recommend to activate and configure host firewalls (UFW or iptables) to allow the protocols given in the table above and filter out everything else.

You can do this no matter what option is choosen for network connectivity.

Additional information

Any decent Linux distribution is enough to run Prelude as long as the following prerequisites are met.

Prelude is available as docker container and the installation is relying on docker compose.