Appliance IP requirements FAQs
The TrendMiner appliance (both when installed as a single node or as a virtual appliance) uses Kubernetes (K3S) as its infrastructure layer, which needs a range of IP addresses for internal communication between different pods and services.
By default the appliance uses the following IP addresses:
These IP addresses should not be used by other applications/servers running on the network on which TrendMiner is deployed. The IPs that are reserved by K3S are only available locally, these are not external interfaces and do not need to be routable. If your company is already using one or more of these IP addresses locally, please contact TrendMiner support to configure different ranges before installing or upgrading TrendMiner.
Q&A
Q: Why does TrendMiner need such a big range of IP addresses? Can we configure a smaller range?
A: Each pod/service needs a different IP and pods/services can be dynamically created. Because TrendMiner deploys quite some pods/services a wide range is needed. However, it is possible to configure a smaller range if the default range is problematic for you. Both ranges can be reduced to /25 ranges at minimal.
Q: What is the reason for need 2 separate /25 subnets as opposed to a single subnet of 256 addresses?
A: TrendMiner runs on Kubernetes which uses one subnet for the pods and another for the services.
Q: Does each address need to access the wider network (e.g. the historian and/or the plant integration server) or are the services’ IPs only used for VM internal communication with each other and the appliance via http/APIs?
A: It is mainly for internal communication. But the NAT is done on the virtual machine and if the IPs overlap the VM doesn't know if the packet needs to be routed internal or external to the cluster.
Q: Since the VM does the NAT, the VM’s IP is the only one that needs a NIC assigned to it in the hypervisor?
A: Yes. Only the VM needs a NIC.
Q: Why does TrendMiner need a range of IP addresses instead of a range of ports?
A: The reason a range of IPs is required (and not a range of ports) is inherent to the Kubernetes stack. The different pods/containers require different internal IP addresses. It is not possible to use ports for this.