Home > Advanced Topics > DevOps and Automation > Kubernetes > White Papers > Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.10 on Dell Infrastructure > CSAH nodes
CSAH nodes are not part of the cluster, but they are required for OpenShift cluster administration and operation. CSAH nodes also provision Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Preboot Execution Environment (PXE), Domain Name System (DNS), and HAProxy services for cluster operation. Although you can use a single CSAH node for development and testing purposes, this approach does not provide resilient load-balancing. For resilient load-balancing, Dell Technologies recommends using two CSAH nodes running HAProxy and KeepAlived. Further, Dell Technologies strongly discourages directly logging in to a control-plane node to manage the cluster. The OpenShift CLI tool oc and the authentication tokens that are required to administer the OpenShift cluster are installed on both CSAH nodes as part of the deployment process. For redundancy, it is recommended that you store backups of OpenShift authentication credentials outside the cluster.
Note: Control-plane nodes are deployed using immutable infrastructure, further driving the preference for an administration host that is external to the cluster.