Automation Suite

2022.10

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Automation Suite Installation Guide

Last updated Apr 8, 2024

Manual: Multi-node HA-ready production profile requirements and installation

This page walks you through the requirements and installation instructions for the multi-node HA-ready production profile.

Deployment Profile Overview

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.

Before choosing your deployment profile, see Supported use cases for single-node and multi-node installations.

The installation process generates self-signed certificates on your behalf. These certificates will expire in 90 days, and you must replace them with certificates signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) as soon as installation completes. If you do not update the certificates, the installation will stop working after 90 days. For instructions, see Managing certificates.

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.

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) is not compatible with Automation Suite. If FIPs is enabled at any point on the servers running Automation Suite, the cluster will fail. If FIPs is enabled on any cluster server, the installer will encounter issues blocking the installation.

Larger node sizes are more efficient than smaller node sizes because of the fixed baseline resource overhead per node. For example, 3 x 32 cores nodes is more efficient than 6 x 16 cores nodes.

Deployment profile	Prerequisites	Requirements	Configuration	Installation
Multi-node HA-ready production profile	Minimum 3 Linux machines (RHEL 8.6, 8.8, or 8.9) with ipcalc tool installed: Additional Linux machine is required when using Task Mining. Additional Linux machine with GPU support is recommended when using Document Understanding. Note: We support new minor versions of RHEL within 90 days of their release. We support SELinux with default policies.	Multi-node HA-ready production machine requirements	Configuring the machines	Online multi-node HA-ready production installation Offline multi-node HA-ready production installation
	Microsoft SQL Server (2016, 2017, 2019, 2022 - Standard and Enterprise editions) 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.	MS SQL Server requirements	Configuring MS SQL Server
	DNS	N/A	Configuring the DNS
	TLS 1.2+	Updating the TLS protocol	N/A
	IPv4 Important: IPv6 is not supported.	N/A	N/A
	Trusted TLS, token-signing and SQL connection encryption certificates	N/A	Configuring the certificates
	Load balancer	N/A	Configuring the load balancer
	Proxy server (optional)	N/A	Configuring proxy on the machine Configuring proxy during installation
	Setting up Kerberos authentication (optional)	N/A	Setting up Kerberos authentication

Important:

RHEL kernel version kernel-4.18.0-477.10.1.el8_8 is affected by an issue that interrupts the installation or management of the Automation Suite cluster. Make sure that none of the Automation Suite nodes uses this kernel version either pre- or post-installation. You can update the kernel version by running the following command:

dnf install -y kernel kernel-tools kernel-tools-libsdnf install -y kernel kernel-tools kernel-tools-libs

Note:

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

Complete product selection

If you opt for the multi-node HA-ready production profile, you must meet the following hard requirements for the Complete product selection. If you want to check the hardware requirements for individual products, see Capacity planning.

General requirements

Hardware	Minimum requirement
Node count	At least 3 server nodes. There must be an odd number of server nodes in a cluster to have increased fault tolerance. There is no limit on the number of agent nodes.
Processor	96 (v-)CPU/cores
Minimum processor per node	8 (v-)CPU/cores
RAM total	192 GiB
Minimum RAM per node	16 GiB
Cluster binaries and state disk for each node	256 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Block storage	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
etcd disk for each server node	16 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 240
UiPath bundle disk (For offline installation only, on one of the server nodes)	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100
Objectstore*	512 GiB SSD Min IOPS: 1100

Note:

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

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.

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 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 classification and extraction tasks, while for OCR we strongly recommend the usage of a GPU VM. Here you can find more information about the CPU/GPU usage within the Document Understanding framework.

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.

Note: Larger node sizes are more efficient than smaller node sizes because of the fixed baseline resource overhead per node. For example, 3 x 32 cores nodes is more efficient than 6 x 16 cores nodes.

Individual Products

This section lists the minimum hardware requirements for a successful Automation Suite deployment. The minimum hardware requirements for your deployment are the sum of the requirements for the shared suite capabilities and the individual products you install.

Important: Aside from meeting the minimum hardware requirements listed in this section, it is highly recommended to have a 20% buffer.

The following table lists the requirements for the shared suite capabilities:

CPU	RAM
Shared suite capabilities	40 (v-)CPU	47.6 GiB

The following table lists the requirements for individual products:

Product	CPU	RAM
Action Center	2 (v-)CPU	4.7 GiB
AI Center	5.5 (v-)CPU	14 GiB
Apps	7.25 (v-)CPU	18.5 GiB
Automation Hub	2 (v-)CPU	3.5 GiB
Automation Ops	1 (v-)CPU	1.7 GiB
Automation Suite Robots	1 (v-)CPU	1.5 GiB
Data Service	0.5 (v-)CPU	1 GiB
Document Understanding	6.7 (v-)CPU	8.6 GiB
Insights	1.5 (v-)CPU	5 GiB
Orchestrator¹	3.5 (v-)CPU	7.2 GiB
Process Mining	5.1 (v-)CPU	6 GiB
Task Mining	8.4 (v-)CPU	10 GiB
Test Manager	1 (v-)CPU	2 GiB

¹ For large robot deployments, you need to increase your Orchestrator HPA capacity. For an over 100.000-robot deployment, we recommend at least 20 pods.

RPM package requirements

Before starting the Automation Suite manual 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 (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.

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>=3.2.3 nmap-ncat bind-utils openssl wget unzip conmon=>2.0.24`	Required on nodes for the execution of the readiness check.
`ansible zip unzip`	Required on the orchestration node for the execution of the `uipathctl.sh` functionality requiring Ansible.
`iscsi-initiator-utils gettext nfs-utils rpcbind util-linux nmap-ncat openssl httpd-tools podman=>3.2.3 zstd`	Required for offline installations only.