Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

Ready to test the new Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud offering?

First, create your account on IBM Cloud if you don’t already have one. From there, navigate to the IBM Cloud Catalog and use the Containers category. You will see a tile called Red Hat OpenShift.

Click Create once you’ve read over the information on the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud landing page.

If you have previously used IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, then this user experience will look consistent. Both cluster types—upstream Kubernetes and OpenShift—are fully managed offerings by IBM. Currently, we are supporting OpenShift 3.11.

Enter cluster information

Scroll down to provide cluster information:

• Cluster name
• Tags (which can be used to identify your various clusters)
• Resource Group (used to group various resources within IBM Cloud together to simplify access controls to those resources)
• Geography (where you want the cluster to run)
• Location (single zone clusters will ensure the masters and workers are all in one data center, while a multi-zone cluster will distribute masters and workers across the data centers within the region specified)
• Metro (identify the specific data center within the selected Geography)
  • As you select various worker zones (data centers), you can choose which of your existing VLANs to deploy worker nodes into (if you don’t have any VLANs yet, we’ll create them for you)
• Master Service Endpoint (determine if the master should be accessible via private endpoint, public endpoint, or both)

Define your worker node flavor

Next, we will define the worker node flavor to be used in the default worker pool. Use the filters on the left-hand side to find the flavor that works best for your workloads, whether that is dedicated compute or GPU-powered bare metal nodes. 

If your initial worker pool is too large or too small, don’t worry—we can create a second pool once the cluster is operational. 

Almost done!  You will notice that, by default, we use LUKS encryption on the second disk where all of your containers are running. If you need to run some high-performance workload, you can choose to deselect this option. Specify the number of worker nodes per zone (since this is a multi-zone cluster).

Create the cluster

Lastly, you can verify that your IBM Cloud account has the proper permissions to deploy this cluster successfully. Once you are satisfied with your selections, click on Create cluster. While you wait for the cluster to deploy, read more in our docs section or get hands-on training. 

I’d rather be in the CLI

The UI is beautiful, but when you are ready to automate cluster creation and lifecycle into your existing CI/CD processes, the CLI and API options are also available. The docs provide additional guidance on deploying Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud clusters via the command line.

ibmcloud ks cluster-create --name my_openshift --location wdc04 --kube-version 3.11_openshift --machine-type b3c.4x16.encrypted  --workers 3 --public-vlan <public_VLAN_ID> --private-vlan <private_VLAN_ID>

Join the discussion

If you have questions or concerns, engage our team via Slack. You can register here and join the discussion in the #questions channel on https://ibm-container-service.slack.com.

Get started with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.