Implementation plan¶

There are two types of implementation: demo and production.

Demo installation (trying functionality out)¶

Please note that there is no way to migrate data from a demo installation to a production installation - it is really meant as a way to try things out.

Please note your data will be in-memory only and may disappear at any given moment!

What you need:¶

• System: Ubuntu 24.04 (Focal) on amd64 architecture with following requirements:
  • CPU cores >= 16
  • Memory > 16 GiB
  • Disk > 200 GiB
• DNS Records:
  • a way to create DNS records for your domain name (e.g. wire.example.com)
  • Find a detailed explanation at How to set up DNS records
• SSL/TLS certificates:
  • a way to create SSL/TLS certificates for your domain name (to allow connecting via https://)
  • To ease out the process of managing certs, we recommend using Let\'s Encrypt & cert-manager
• Network: No interference from UFW or other system specific firewalls, and IP forwarding enabled between network cards. Public internet access to download Wire artifacts and Ubuntu packages.
• Packages: Ansible and Git installed on the localhost (any machine you have access to)
  • Ansible version: [core 2.16.3] or compatible
• Permissions: Sudo access required for installation on remote_node
• Deployment requirements:
  • Clone of wire-server-repository and editing ansible/inventory/demo/host.yml as explained in Deployment requirements
• Network Access Requirements:

• Note: If outbound traffic is restricted, Note on port ranges should be followed.

Next steps for demo installation¶

When the above requirements are achieved, continue with the ansible playbook instructions for the demo wire in a box installation.

Production installation (persistent data, high-availability)¶

What you need:

• a way to create DNS records for your domain name (e.g. wire.example.com)
• a way to create SSL/TLS certificates for your domain name (to allow connecting via https://wire.example.com)
• A kubernetes cluster with at least 3 worker nodes and at least 3 etcd nodes (some cloud providers offer a managed kubernetes cluster these days)
• minimum 17 virtual machines for components outside kubernetes (cassandra, minio, elasticsearch, redis, restund)

A recommended installation of Wire-server in any regular data centre, configured with high-availability will require the following virtual servers:

General Hardware Requirements

• Minimum 3 physical servers required
• Wire has a minimum requirement for a total of 16 Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machines across the 3 servers (in accordance with the table above)

Conference Calling Hardware Requirements

• Kubernetes Hosts may need additional resources for SFT services. For concurrent SFT users (SFT = Selective Forwarding Turn-server, ie. Conference calling), we recommend an extra 3% of CPU allocation, evenly distributed across the nodes (i.e. 1% more CPU per kubernetes server). So for every 100 users plan on adding one CPU core on each Kubernetes node. The SFT component runs inside of Kubernetes, and does not require a separate virtual machine for operation.

A production installation will look a bit like this:

If you use a private datacenter (not a cloud provider), the easiest is to have three physical servers, each with one virtual machine for each server component (cassandra, minio, elasticsearch, redis, kubernetes, restund)

It’s up to you how you create these VMs - kvm on a bare metal machine, VM on a cloud provider, etc. Make sure they run ubuntu 18.04.

Ensure that your VMs have IP addresses that do not change.

Avoid 10.x.x.x network address schemes, and instead use something like 192.168.x.x or 172.x.x.x. This is because internally, Kubernetes already uses a 10.x.x.x address scheme, creating a potential conflict.

Next steps for high-available production installation¶

Your next step will be Installing kubernetes and databases on VMs with ansible