System requirements

Use this information when planning your installation of containerized Ansible Automation Platform.

Prerequisites

  • Configure a dedicated non-root user on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux host.
    • This user requires sudo or other Ansible supported privilege escalation (sudo is recommended) to perform administrative tasks during the installation.
    • This user is responsible for the installation of containerized Ansible Automation Platform.
    • This user is also the service account for the containers running Ansible Automation Platform.
  • For each Red Hat Enterprise Linux host in your containerized deployment, configure a dedicated user. The containerized installation program connects as this user to run tasks on the host. For more information about configuring a dedicated user on each host, see Create the installation user.
  • For remote host installations, configure SSH public key authentication for the non-root user. For guidelines on setting up SSH public key authentication for the non-root user, see This content is not included.How to configure SSH public key authentication for passwordless login.
  • Ensure the Red Hat Enterprise Linux host has internet access if you are using the default online installation method.
  • Open the appropriate network ports if you have a firewall in place. For more information about the ports to open, see Container enterprise topology in Tested deployment models.
Important:

Podman does not support storing container images on an NFS share. To use an NFS share for the user home directory, set up the Podman storage backend path outside of the NFS share. For more information, see This content is not included.Rootless Podman and NFS.

Warning:

External security and monitoring tools can impact job stability

Enterprise endpoint detection software, monitoring agents, and operating system audit logging can interfere with Ansible Automation Platform job execution, resulting in unexpected job delays, stalls, or complete failures.

This interference is not a defect in Ansible Automation Platform, but rather a side effect of how external tools interact with normal Ansible Automation Platform operational behavior (high I/O rates, rapid file access, network communication, and CPU resource usage).

Common interference sources:

  • Antivirus or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software, for example, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trend Micro Deep Security, Trelix Endpoint Security (formerly McAfee).
  • System monitoring and telemetry agents.
  • Operating system audit logging (auditd, syslog) configured with granular rules.

Mitigation

Work with your security and infrastructure teams to implement the following exclusions on all Ansible Automation Platform execution nodes and control nodes:
  1. Add the following paths to antivirus/EDR scanning exclusions:
    • $HOME/aap/ (where $HOME  is the installation user's home directory)
    • $HOME/.local/share/containers/ (container storage and image cache)
    • /tmp (and any other temporary directories configured for Ansible Automation Platform)
  2. Configure monitoring agents to exclude Ansible Automation Platform process monitoring or reduce sampling frequency on Ansible Automation Platform nodes
  3. Review auditd rules on Ansible Automation Platform nodes and disable overly granular system call auditing that may create disk I/O contention. Note that auditd is configured on RHEL by default. If it is configured on your systems, this step is applicable.

For more information, see Red Hat Knowledge Solution 7144721

Ansible Automation Platform system requirements

Your system must meet the following minimum system requirements to install and run Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Table 1. System configuration
Type Description Notes

Subscription
  • Valid Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription
  • Valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription (to consume the BaseOS and AppStream repositories)

Operating system
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6 or later minor versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 or later minor versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

CPU architecture

x86_64, AArch64

IBM Z (s390x) and IBM Power (ppc64le) are not supported in Ansible Automation Platform 2.7. For IBM architecture support, use Ansible Automation Platform 2.6.

ansible-core

  • RHEL 9: installation program uses ansible-core 2.14, Ansible Automation Platform operation uses ansible-core 2.16.
  • RHEL 10: installation program uses ansible-core 2.16, Ansible Automation Platform operation uses ansible-core 2.16.
  • The installation program uses the ansible-core package from the RHEL AppStream repository.
  • Ansible Automation Platform bundles ansible-core 2.16 for operation, so you do not need to install it manually.

Browser

A currently supported version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

Database
  • For Ansible Automation Platform managed databases: PostgreSQL 15.
  • For customer provided (external) databases: PostgreSQL 15, 16, or 17.
  • External (customer supported) databases require International Components for Unicode (ICU) support.
  • External databases using PostgreSQL 16 or 17 must rely on external backup and restore processes. Backup and restore functionality is dependent on utilities provided with PostgreSQL 15.

IP version

IPv4, IPv6 (single-stack and dual-stack)

Each virtual machine (VM) has the following system requirements:

Table 2. Virtual machine requirements
Requirement Minimum requirement

RAM
  • 16 GB
  • 32 GB required for growth topology bundled installations with hub_seed_collections=true. Seeding the collections can take 45 or more minutes.

CPUs

4

Local disk
  • Total available disk space: 60 GB
  • Installation directory: 15 GB (if on a dedicated partition)
  • /var/tmp for online installations: 1 GB
  • /var/tmp for offline or bundled installations: 3 GB
  • Temporary directory (defaults to /tmp) for offline or bundled installations: 10GB

Disk IOPS

3000

Database requirements

Ansible Automation Platform can work with two varieties of database:

  1. Database installed with Ansible Automation Platform - This database consists of a PostgreSQL installation done as part of an Ansible Automation Platform installation using PostgreSQL packages that Red Hat provides.
  2. Customer provided or configured database - This is an external database that the customer provides, whether on bare metal, virtual machine, container, or cloud hosted service.

Ansible Automation Platform requires a customer provided (external) database to have International Components for Unicode (ICU) support.