automation-suite

2024.10

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Automation Suite on Linux Installation Guide

Last updated Nov 28, 2024

Hardware and software requirements

Terminology

To find out more about the core concepts used in an Automation Suite deployment, see Glossary.

Product selection

The default installation experience includes a choice of two product selections:

Complete (All products) – Install the complete list of products available in Automation Suite. For details, see Automation Suite products.
Select products – Allows you to select and install only the products you are interested in. Note, however, that the installer takes the cross-product dependencies into consideration. That means that if a product requires the installation of another product, you must install both of them. For details, see Cross-product dependencies.

Note:
You can enable additional products later in the same deployment at any point in time, after the initial installation, without having to reinstall. For details, see Managing products.

We recommend validating the hardware requirements based on expected usage and ensuring the deployment has enough capacity before adding additional products. For details, see Capacity planning.

Choose your deployment profile

You can deploy Automation Suite in single-node evaluation, lite mode, or multi-node HA-ready production mode. While most of the prerequisites for the profiles are identical, multi-node HA-ready production mode requires additional resources.

Once the deployment starts, you cannot switch or upgrade from one deployment profile to another, except from lite mode to multi-node HA-ready and the other way around. Before choosing your deployment profile, see Supported profile use cases.

Important: Linux and Kubernetes knowledge is required regardless of the deployment profile you choose. If you encounter issues installing and configuring Automation Suite, contact UiPath® Professional Services.

Prerequisites at a glance

Prerequisite type	Prerequisite
Hardware	A minimum of one machine for single-node deployments. This configuration is supported only for evaluation and demo scenarios, not for production deployments. A minimum of three machines for multi-node deployments. This is the only configuration supported for production deployments.
	General machine requirements Details...
	Requirements specific to the following products: Task Mining Automation Suite Robots AI Center AI Computer Vision Document Understanding Details...
	Supported RHEL version and ipcalc tool installed on all the Linux machines.For details about RHEL compatibility with previous Automation Suite versions, see RHEL compatibility matrix. Note: We support new minor versions of RHEL within 90 days of their release. We support SELinux with default policies.
	FIPS 140-2 Details...
	Load balancer L4 / Network Load Balancer Details...
	NFS server requirement (on-premises or cloud-managed NFS server with NFSv3/NFSv4 version on Linux based) CPU - 4vCPU RAM - 8GiB Storage - 1 TiB For external objectstore, a few GiBs are needed For in-cluster objectstore, the minimum must be the same as the size of the objectstore Details...
	Node ports Details...
Software	RPM packages on each machine Details...
	SQL Server Details...
	Objectstore (Azure Blob storage, AWS S3, S3 compatible objectstore) Details...
	OCI-compliant registry Details...
	DNS Details...
	TLS 1.2+
	IPv4 (IPv6 is not supported)
	Swap memory must be disabled.
	TLS certificate Identity token-signing certificate (certificate to sign the authentication/bearer token) The additional CA certificates for any of the external components, such as SQL Server, objectstore, registry, SMTP, etc.

Important:

You need root permission to install and deploy Automation Suite. For more on the specific components that require root access, see Root privileges requirement.
Cilium requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN permissions to function correctly. Make sure these permissions are granted.
Having scan agents running on your system may cause installation or runtime failures, due to the changes they make to the IPTables. To avoid this behavior, configure your scan agent so that it does not interfere with the Automation Suite installation.
UiPath® does not prescribe specific firewall or developer tool configurations as long as the Automation Suite requirements are met. Based on our observations, a limited number of external tools can interfere with the smooth operation of Automation Suite. If such issues arise, contact the relevant vendor for help. For additional guidance, see the Automation Suite responsibility matrix.

Hardware requirements

Before you begin, consider the following:

Automation Suite supports Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2). You can perform a clean installation of Automation Suite on a FIPS 140-2-enabled host. You can also enable FIPS 140-2 on a machine where you previously performed an Automation Suite installation. For details, see Security and compliance.
Note:
Insights is currently not supported on FIPS-enabled hosts. Make sure to disable Insights when installing Automation Suite on a FIPS-enabled host.

The minimum hardware requirements do not protect the deployment from node failures.
The multi-node HA-ready production profile is resilient to only one node failure. This means that you can lose only one server node. This restriction does not apply to agent nodes. You can lose as many agent nodes and still continue to use the cluster without downtime as long as enough overall cluster capacity is available.
You can increase the server node tolerance to failure by following the instructions in Advanced installation experience.

The following sections list out the hardware requirements for both the Complete product selection and individual products.

Complete product selection: hardware requirements

The following sections describe the hard requirements for the Complete product selection.

General requirements

Hardware for all products	Single-node minimum requirement	Multi-node minimum requirements
Processor per cluster	32 (v-)CPU/cores	96 (v-)CPU/cores
Minimum processor per node	N/A	8 (v-)CPU/cores
RAM	64 GiB	192 GiB
Minimum RAM per node	N/A	16 GiB
Cluster disks*	256 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100	256 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Data disk Required only on the server nodes	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
etcd disk Required only on the server nodes	16 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 240	16 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 240
UiPath® bundle disk Required only on the first server node Required only for offline Required only if an external registry is not available	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Objectstore Required only on the server nodes Required only if the external objectstore is not available	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Additional disk space for Ceph data backups Required only in single-node RKE2 setup with in-cluster storage	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100	N/A

*The following considerations apply to cluster disk capacity:

You may need to increase cluster disk capacity based on your AI Center ML skills and training storage requirements.
If you enable Document Understanding modern projects, the minimum cluster disk capacity is 512 GiB.

Note:

If you install Automation Suite in single-node evaluation mode, and you do not have a machine with 32 (v-)CPU/cores and 64 GiB of RAM, you can bring machines with a minimum of 8 (v-)CPU/cores and 16 GiB of RAM. For more details, see Capacity calculator.

If you choose this option, follow the multi-node installation and configuration instructions.

It is recommended to bring external objectstore whenever possible. This helps in scaling the objectstore independently of the cluster, and brings additional stability. We support the following objectstore options:

Azure storage account
AWS S3 storage bucket
S3 compatible storage bucket

Individual products: hardware requirements

For details on the hardware requirements your must meet to install individual products or various product combinations in Automation Suite, use the Automation Suite Install Sizing Calculator.

Additional Task Mining requirements

Task Mining requires an additional agent node that must meet the following requirements:

Hardware	Minimum requirement
Processor	20 (v-)CPU/cores
RAM	60 GiB
Cluster binaries and state disk	256 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Data disk	N/A

Additional Automation Suite Robots requirements

In multi-node HA-ready production environments, Automation Suite Robots require an additional agent node. In single-node evaluation environments, an additional Automation Suite Robots node is optional.

The hardware requirements for the Automation Suite Robots node depend on the way you plan to use your resources. In addition to the additional agent node requirements, you also need a minimum of 10 GiB to enable package caching.

The following sections describe the factors that impact the amount of hardware the Automation Suite Robots node requires.

Robot size

The following table describes the required CPU, memory, and storage for all robot sizes.

Size	CPU	Memory	Storage
Small	0.5	1 GiB	1 GiB
Standard	1	2 GiB	2 GiB
Medium	2	4 GiB	4 GiB
Large	6	10 GiB	10 GiB

Agent node size

The resources of the Automation Suite Robots agent node have an impact on the number of jobs that can be run concurrently. The reason is that the number of CPU cores and the amount of RAM capacity are divided by the CPU/memory requirements of the job.

For example, a node with 16 CPUs and 32 GiB of RAM would be able to run any of the following:

32 Small jobs
16 Standard jobs
8 Medium jobs
2 Large jobs

Job sizes can be mixed, so at any given moment, the same node could run a combination of jobs, such as the following:

10 Small jobs (consuming 5 CPUs and 10 GiB of memory)
4 Standard jobs (consuming 4 CPUs and 8 GiB of memory)
3 Medium jobs (consuming 6 CPUs and 12 GiB of memory)

Kubernetes resource consumption

Given that the node is part of a Kubernetes cluster, the Kubernetes agent present on the server (kubelet) consumes a small amount of resources. Based on our measurements, the kubelet consumes the following resources:

0.6 CPU
0.4 GiB RAM

A node similar to the one previously described would actually have approximately 15.4 CPUs and 31.6 GiB of RAM.

Automatic machine size selection

All your cross-platform processes have the Automation Suite Robots option set to Automatic by default. This setting selects the appropriate machine size for running the process using serverless robots.

When automatically choosing the size, the criteria listed in the below table are evaluated in order. As soon as one criterion is satisfied, the corresponding machine size is chosen and the remaining criteria are not evaluated.

Order	Criterion	Machine size
1	Remote debugging job	Medium
2	Process depends on UI Automation OR Process depends on the UiPath Document Understanding activities	Standard
3	Other unattended process	Small

Additional AI Center and Document Understanding requirements

On top of the core service requirements that are part of full platform requirements, AI Center requires additional resources, depending on the models that you want to run or train. For more details about the required GPU hardware generations and compatible NVIDIA drivers, refer to Compatibility Matrix.

Note:

AI Center requires disk storage at runtime for the ML Skills and for the training pipeline, as follows:

The ML Skills require disk space on the /var/lib/rancher partition for storing the trained model for predictions. In the worst case scenario, the model size can be as big as 20 GiB.
The training pipeline consumes the storage from the /var/lib/rancher partition for hosting the model. In the worst case scenario, the model size can be as big as 20 GiB, and additionaly, it can require storage for the dataset. The minimum size of the dataset storage can be 51 GiB; its recommended size is 105 GiB. This must be on the dedicated disk for AI Center. The training pipeline only schedules on the node on which the dedicated AI Center disk is attached.

The following table describes the additional resources AI Center needs. In the following table, Data Disk is needed on all server nodes. Data Disk is not needed on agent nodes.

Use	CPU	RAM (GiB)	GPU	Disk (GiB)
Minimum for serving (ML Skill, one replica)	0.6	2	0	20 GiB on the `rancher` partition
Minimum for Training (Pipeline)	1	4	0	20 GiB on the `rancher` partition Minimum 51 GiB AI Center disk partition(recommended 105 GiB)
DU model Serving (ML Skill, one replica)	1	4	0	20 GiB on the `rancher` partition
DU model Training	2	24	Strongly recommended	20 GiB on the `rancher` partition Minimum 51 GiB Data Disk (recommended 105 GiB)

Note: The following table describes the required resources for small and average AI Center implementations. Note that these numbers are general guidance.

In the following table, Data Disk is needed on all server nodes. Data Disk is not needed on agent nodes.

Use	CPU	RAM (GiB)	GPU	Disk (GiB)
Small implementation: 3 models served 1 concurrent pipeline	4	32	0	80 GiB on the `rancher` partition¹ 105 Data Disk ²
Average implementation: 5 models served 2 concurrent pipelines DU model training	8	52	Strongly recommended	160 GiB on the `rancher` partition ³ 315 Data Disk ⁴

¹ (3 skills +1 pipeline) * 20 GiB on the rancher partition = 80 GiB on the rancher partition

² 1 pipeline * 105GiB = 105 Data disk

³ (5 skills + 2 pipeline + 1 DU pipeline) * 20 GiB on the rancher partition = 160 GiB on the rancher partition

⁴ (2 pipeline + 1 DU pipeline) * 105GiB = 315 Data disk

Additional AI Computer Vision requirements

This setup works on on-premises Nvidia GPUs, but also works with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP. Suggested GPU types include those from the RTX, Tesla, and Ampere family of products which have enough GPU memory and processing capability.

The main difference between these two types of GPUs is that the ones with virtualization usually have more GPU RAM and are offered by most cloud providers. Having more GPU RAM increases the maximum size of the image you can input to the model. In conclusion, virtualization GPUs are not significantly faster that the consumer GPUs.

You need a machine with the following hardware specifications:

Hardware specification	Requirements
Memory	minimum: 8 GB recommended: 16 GB
CPU	minimum: 2 cores with AVX2 enabled recommended: 4 cores with AVX2 enabled
GPU	minimum: 8 GB VRAM recommended: 16 GB VRAM
Storage	minimum: 30 GB free

Additional Document Understanding recommendations

For increased performance, you can install Document Understanding on an additional agent node with GPU support. Note, however, that Document Understanding is fully functional without the GPU node. Actually, Document Understanding uses CPU VMs for all its extraction and classification tasks, while for OCR we strongly recommend the usage of a GPU VM.

For more details about the CPU/GPU usage within the Document Understanding framework, refer to CPU and GPU Usage.

If you want to use an additional node with GPU support, you must meet the following requirements:

Hardware	Minimum requirement
Processor	8 (v-)CPU/cores
RAM	52 GiB
Cluster binaries and state disk	256 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Data disk	N/A
GPU RAM	11 GiB

For more details, see AI Center considerations.

Additional Document Understanding modern projects requirements

For optimal performance, a minimum of 5 GPUs is required for Document Understanding modern projects. The example scenario in the following table demonstrates how 5 GPUs is enough to process 300 pages.

Function	Number
Custom model pages processed per hour	300
Out of the box model pages processed per hour	0
Models training in parallel	1
Number of pages in all projects - Design time	200
Number of document types per project version	3

The 5 GPUs are distributed amongst different functions, as detailed in the following table:

Service	Number of GPUs
OCR replicas	1
Custom model training replicas	1
Custom model replicas	2
Out of the box model replicas	1
Total	5

For more information on how to allocate GPUs to each service, check the Allocating GPU resources for Document Understanding modern projects page.

In addition to the GPU demands, Document Understanding modern projects also require specific CPU resources for optimal performance. For optimal performance, a minimum of 18 vCPUs is required.

With the modern Document Understanding project, an additional 4 TiB of the objectstore is required to perform the activities from the above examples continuously for one year. You can start with a smaller number, but the activity will fail once the storage is complete, unless you explicitly scale it.

If you are provisioning for one year of continuous processing, you will need 4 TiB for Document Understanding modern projects and 512 GiB for the other products. The total will be 4.5 TiB of storage. Similarly, if you start with six months of processing, you will need 2 TiB for Document Understanding modern projects and 512 GiB for the other products. In this case the total will be 2.5 TiB.

Note: For more detailed calculations and the capacity required for your needs, check the UiPath Automation Suite Install Sizing Calculator.

RPM package requirements

Before starting the Automation Suite installation, you must ensure you meet the following requirements:

you have a RHEL subscription;
you enabled the BaseOS and AppStream repositories;
you installed the required RPM packages.

The following table lists the required RPM packages:

RPM package	Description
`iscsi-initiator-utils nfs-utils rpcbind util-linux nmap-ncat openssl httpd-tools gettext zstd`	Required on nodes for installation.
`podman>=4.0.2 nmap-ncat bind-utils openssl wget unzip conmon=>2.0.24`	Required on nodes for the execution of the readiness check.
`iscsi-initiator-utils gettext nfs-utils rpcbind util-linux nmap-ncat openssl httpd-tools podman=>4.0.2 zstd`	Required for offline installations only.

Note:

RHEL 8.4 and later have the required RPM packages in the BaseOS and AppStream repositories by default.

Manual installations

If you perform a manual clean installation of Automation Suite, you must ensure you meet the RPM package requirements. In this case, you are responsible for installing the required RPM packages.

If you upgrade from a previous Automation Suite version, you have already installed the RPM packages.

For details on the tools you can use to install and validate RPM packages, see Validating and installing the required RPM packages.

Cloud templates

If you install Automation Suite using our Azure, AWS, or GCP templates, no action is needed from your side. The templates provision the full infrastructure, including the RPM packages.

Microsoft SQL Server general requirements

Note: Unless otherwise specified in the dedicated requirements sections, these requirements are applicable to all Automation Suite products.

The installation requires an external SQL server as a prerequisite. Microsoft SQL Server 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2022 Standard and Enterprise editions are supported.

Additional Microsoft SQL platforms, such as Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance, as well as Amazon Relational Database Service are also supported as long as the Microsoft SQL Server database engine meets the requirements.

Note: Make sure that the SQL server can be accessed from each cluster VM.

Important:

Individual product support varies.

For each product you plan to deploy, you must:

check the supported version of SQL Server as required by the product;
apply the SQL Server configuration prerequisites, including SQL Server User permission, as required by the product.

For more information on product-specific SQL Server requirements, see Configuring Microsoft SQL Server.

The general minimum hardware requirements for Microsoft SQL Server are as follows:

8 (v-)CPU
32 GiB RAM
256 GiB SSD

These minimum requirements are general guidance and do not guarantee reliable operation in a production deployment. Capacity planning is required to determine the hardware requirements that are needed for reliable operation.

For each product you plan to deploy, you must evaluate projected usage and apply the capacity planning guidance as specified by the product. This information is available in the help section of each individual product.

NFS Server general requirements

To enable a backup, you need an external NFS server. Automation Suite supports Linux-based on-premises or cloud-managed NFS servers, version NFSv3/NFSv4.

Note: Make sure that the NFS server can be accessed from each cluster VM.

The general minimum hardware requirements for NFS Server are as follows:

CPU - 4 vCPU
RAM - 8 GiB
Storage - 1 TiB

Note: If you use an external objectstore, the storage requirement is a few GiBs. If you use an in-cluster objectstore, the minimum storage size is the same as the size of the objectstore.

Disaster recovery - Active/Passive requirements

To configure an Active/Passive deployment, make sure you meet the following requirements:

Hardware
Load balancers
DNS
Certificates
Objectstore
Traffic Manager

Hardware

Both Automation Suite clusters must meet a set of software and hardware requirements. For details, see the hardware requirements for the multi-node mode.