Route to OpenShift 3.11 deployment for CPD 2.5

In the latest release of the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform, version 2.5, the key factors are Red Hat integration, new key built-in capabilities and a strong emphasis on open source. Starting with the version 2.5, Cloud Pak for Data (CPD) can be deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP). The Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11 is required to use Cloud Pak for Data. In earlier version of CPD, IBM Cloud Private (ICP) used to provide the environment for managing containers that includes private image repository, a management console, and monitoring frameworks. ICP has been replaced with OpenShift in CPD version 2.5.

RHOCP is a set of modular components and services built on top of a Kubernetes container infrastructure. RHOCP adds the capabilities to provide a production PaaS platform such as remote management, multitenancy, increased security, monitoring and auditing, application life-cycle management, and self-service interfaces for developers. It is a microservices-based, layered system designed to expose underlying Docker or Cri-o formatted container image and Kubernetes concepts as accurately as possible, with a focus on easy composition of applications by a developer. The Docker service provides the abstraction for packaging and creating Linux-based, lightweight container images. Kubernetes provides the cluster management and orchestrates containers on multiple hosts. RHOCP runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster, with data about the objects stored in etcd, a reliable clustered key-value store. CPD is fully integrated and certified on RHOCP, making it the architecture platform for delivery. It has been focused on the success of developer community and the ability to easily infuse CPD’s AI capabilities into Red Hat application development.

As you can see RHOCP is mandatory for deploy current version of CPD. It takes significant effort to deploy a RHOCP cluster. You can install RHOCP by running series of ansible playbooks that documented at Installing OpenShift Container Platform. Before you install your ROHCP cluster, you need to do some instance planning and that also documented under Planning your installation. Planning is the part where you should spend enough time. Because success or failure of the RHOCP installation mostly depend on how you plan and follow through the process. OpenShift documented all the deployment process but you still need some additional verifications during the planning period. You need to ensure that your cluster meet the hardware and software requirements for deploy OpenShift for CPD. In this article I will go over these requirements. But don’t be worry, we have ansible script to check these requirements.

Hardware requirements

• When you size your system, think about the types of workloads you plan to run. A bare minimum cluster could be as follows:

• The x86–64 processor is only supported for install the CPD.
• CPU must support SSE 4.2 type instructions

Operating system requirements

• You need 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7.6 or 7.7
• Latest RHEL kernel patch must installed
• Semaphore must be set according to the CPD requirement. It should be “250 1024000 32 4096”
• Kernel virtual memory map areas for processor must be set to 262144 or higher.
• Disable all pre-existing cron job for user root
• All node name must be in lowercase

Authentication requirements

• Installer need Secure Shell (SSH) to access to all nodes in the cluster from the bastion node.

Security requirements

• Linux kernel security module for support access control security policies (SELinux) must be enable and set to enforcing mode.

File system requirement

• Root file system must be at least 50 Gb of free space on each node
• All of the disk partitions that are listed in the hardware requirements section must be XFS type.

Docker requirement

• Docker must install on all nodes
• If you are planning to use NFS for persistent volume, make sure /var/lib/docker should have 200Gb of free space.
• If you are going use Portworx as persistent volume, /var/lib/containers should have 200Gb free space and /var/lib/docker should not be a mount point.

Package requirements

• Ansible version should be 2.6.19

Disk requirements

• To ensure that the storage partition has good disk I/O performance, disk latency must be better than 286 Kb/sec.
• Disk throughput must the equal or bather than 209 Mb/sec.

Network requirements

• Use the same network interface
• Have a static IP address that is pingable
• Have a working DNS that does not use loopback
• IPV4 IP Forwarding Set to Enable
• Have a gateway that is specified within the network configuration

The ansible pre-check script is available on the Github. Please check the README.md file for download instruction and usage of ansible pre-check.

There are lots of changes introduced in CPD version 2.5. Please try out the ansible pre-check when you planing to deploy a RHOCP for CPD. Report issues and enhancements in the Github as we still have opportunity to add more checks for an effortless CPD deployment.