Creating a Red Hat OpenShift cluster¶

Audience: Architects, Application developers, Administrators

Overview¶

In this topic we're going to:

Introduce you to IBM Technology Zone
Provision an OpenShift cluster

By the end of this topic you'll have created an OpenShift cluster for the MQ tutorials.

IBM Technology Zone¶

IBM Technology Zone is a one-stop shop to get access to technical environments and software for demos, prototyping and deployment. We're going to use it to provision the OpenShift cluster used by our tutorial.

Technology zone can be used to provision a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on different infrastructure including IBM Cloud, Azure, AWS and VMWare. There is also a degree of flexibility to configure the compute, storage and network for these infrastructures. The MQ tutorial will work on all of these platforms.

It is also possible to provision a cluster via the command line using the instructions in the Hands-on section of this guide.

Decide infrastructure¶

Decide which infrastructure platform you are going to use for your Red Hat OpenShift cluster from the available options:

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

Click on your chosen infrastructure link above or scroll to down to the appropriate section in this topic.

OpenShift on IBM Cloud¶

Navigate to the IBM Technology Zone

In your browser, navigate to the IBM Technology Zone to create your cluster.
- You will need to sign-in with your IBM credentials if your browser has not authenticated.
- You will need to read and accept Terms and conditions to proceed to the IBM Technology Zone.
Reserve a cluster

You can reserve a cluster immediately on IBM Cloud.

Click on the Reserve now radio button.

Info

It takes between 30 and 60 minutes to provision a cluster. Moreover, once a cluster has been provisioned, by default, it will be deleted after 3 days -- unless you renew it. It can therefore be helpful to schedule the environment to be created later if you are not going to be using it for a while -- such as for a future demonstration or classroom session. Come back and explore the Schedule for later option another time.
Complete reservation details - step 1

You will be asked to complete your reservations details in two steps.

Firstly, when you make a cluster reservation, you can supply a set of details that describe:
- The cluster name
- The purpose of the reservation from a pre-defined set
- A description, which will appear when you set the purpose of your reservation to Practice/Self-Education.
Complete the details as follows:
- Type a helpful Name such as My cluster 1
- Select Practice/Self-Education from the Purpose drop-down list
- Type a helpful Purpose Description such as Education
- Do not select Preferred Geography yet; we will do that in a moment
- Add some helpful Notes such as Learn how to build a cloud native production reference deployment using a CloudPak and OpenShift on IBM Cloud
Complete reservation details - step 2

The second step in registration is to specify the physical details of the compute infrastructure for your cluster.

When you make a cluster reservation, you can supply a set of details that describe:
- The cluster's geographical location
- The version of OpenShift Container Platform used by the cluster
- The number of CPUs in the cluster and their memory size
- The number of Kubernetes worker nodes in the cluster
- The OCS storage size for the cluster
- The End date and time for the cluster
Complete the details as follows:
- Select your Preferred Geography such as London 5, HongKong 2 or San Jose 04.
- Under End date and time, select a date and specify the time along with its time zone.
- Select OpenShift Version as 4.10 from the drop-down-list
- Select Worker Node Count as 3 from the drop-down list
- Select Worker Node Flavor as b3c.8x32 (8 vCPU x 32GB - 100GB Secondary Storage) from the drop-down list
- Select NFS Size as 500 GB from the drop-down list
Info

By default, your cluster will be reserved for three days, after which time it will be deleted. This is more than enough time to complete this tutorial. If required, you can increase the cluster lifetime by configuring the End date and time. Don't do this unless you really need to do so; as you'll learn in the tutorial, the use of GitOps makes it quick and easy to provision a cluster when you need to do so.
Create the cluster

Check your reservation details and press Submit when you're ready to create the cluster:

Info

The cluster provisioning process will take between 30 and 60 minutes to complete on IBM Cloud.
Provisioning email

As the provisioning process starts, you will receive an email to confirm that the provisioning process has started:
Checking the cluster provisioning status

You can also view the status of your provisioning request on IBM Technology Zone.

Click on My reservations to see:

Note:
- The Status field will be Ready when the cluster has been provisioned.
- The creation and expiry date-time for your cluster.
You can return to the reservation at any time to get the details of your cluster.
Cluster provisioned email

You will receive another email once your cluster is ready:

Success

Your cluster is now provisioned and ready to use.

Warning

Note the expiry date-time.

Note

Be sure to read the IMPORTANT: clause at the end of the email. If your cluster has been provisioned to an IBM Cloud account you have not used before, and you have not accepted the invitation to that account, you will not be able to see your cluster when you click on the Cluster URL link in the following step. It is recommended to always click on the HERE link in the clause to see if you need to accept an invitation.
Navigate to your cluster

You can use the information in the notification email to access your cluster.

Click on the Cluster URL link to login to IBM Cloud and locate your OpenShift cluster:

Note:
- The Cluster ID that has been assigned by IBM Cloud.
- The Zone matches your requested geography.
- The OCP Version matches your requested version of OCP.
- The Node status identifies the 3 worker nodes in the Normal state.
Feel free to explore this web page.
Receiving cluster deletion email and extending your cluster's lifetime

When your cluster is within 3 days of deletion, you will receive a daily email:

Note:
- You can extend your cluster if required.
- This option may be limited to certain types of reservations.
- The My reservations page allows you to manage your cluster reservation

Congratulations, you've now created your cluster. In the next topic, we're going to configure the cluster for GitOps, so that we can manage it quickly, easily and effectively.