Lifecycle Manager supported capabilities

Answers to questions about the supported capabilities of LCM.

Lifecycle Manager (LCM) provides powerful abilities for provisioning and configuring DataStax Enterprise (DSE) clusters. The following questions and answers describe the supported capabilities of LCM.

How many nodes can LCM support when creating DSE clusters?

LCM supports creating DSE clusters with up to 300 nodes. Larger clusters cannot be managed using the LCM web interface. The OpsCenter APIs can be used directly to attempt to manage larger clusters, provided sufficient heap memory is available.

Do OpsCenter and LCM support decommission of nodes?

OpsCenter supports decommissioning a node. LCM does not currently automate node decommission.
Warning: After decommissioning a node, you must delete the corresponding node model in LCM prior to running the next configure or install job. Otherwise, LCM attempts to restore the old topology, with unpredictable results.

Do OpsCenter and LCM support multi-instance nodes?

OpsCenter supports monitoring multi-instance nodes.
Note: Lifecycle Manager does not currently support managing DSE Multi-Instance nodes (also referred to as dense nodes).

Which snitches does LCM support?

At this time, only the GossipingPropertyFileSnitch (GPFS) is supported for managing or importing DSE clusters in LCM because it is the only snitch that supports all possible topologies, and that can be configured independently on each node.

GPFS is automatically configured according to the rack setting on each node in the cluster topology. For information about migrating to GPFS, see PropertyFileSnitch and GossipingPropertyFileSnitch considerations.

What partitioners does LCM support?

What operating systems does LCM support?

Lifecycle Manager runs on OpsCenter-supported Linux environments only.
Note: As of OpsCenter and Lifecycle Manager 6.1.3 and later, LCM automatically performs an OS supported platform check for the version of DSE being installed. For details, see Supported OS platform check for DSE installs.

Does LCM integrate with container orchestration tools?

No. LCM relies on SSH to communicate with target nodes, and requires target nodes to have a full, traditional Linux operating system. LCM works best with IaaS, virtual machines, or bare metal targets.