A deep dive into the architectural considerations for OpenShift Hosted Control Planes (HCP), covering the critical infrastructure decisions teams must make before adoption. Key topics include: the role of the Multicluster Engine (MCE) Operator, etcd storage requirements (WAL fsync p99 latency must stay below 10ms), load balancing strategies, and DNS planning. For bare metal deployments, MetalLB (L2 vs BGP mode) and the Agent provider workflow are explained. For OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt), the post covers co-located vs. separate infrastructure cluster tradeoffs, overlay vs. localnet (VLAN) networking options, and VM disk storage capacity planning. The article emphasizes that storage validation, network topology, and resource quotas must be addressed upfront to avoid operational pitfalls at scale.
