Integrating RHOCP in the enterprise

Edit online

In a real customer environment, RHOCP is not an isolated deployment. Therefore, integration and interaction with other workloads that are distributed across an IT landscape is a key aspect of each RHOCP architecture. The various networking capabilities and options on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are outlined in detail in this reference architecture.

For an RHOCP environment, you require administrative access to the DNS configuration to configure the required domains used by the RHOCP clusters. A default network policy mode is implemented for each RHOCP internal SDN (Software Defined Network).

The following are key components of the networking integration concepts:

Load balancer
The load balancer helps ensure that the workload is spread across the available compute nodes. In PoC environments, the load balancer can be provided as a software component within your RHOCP installation. For production purposes, it is recommended to implement load balancing as a dedicated component or hardware.
DNS
As RHOCP has patterns on naming of servers and workload apps, the DNS is a key part of your deployment. You need to have administrative access to a DNS zone to manage the required RHOCP entries.
DHCP
Depending whether the implementation uses dynamic IP addresses for the RHOCP nodes, it is required to have a DHCP service. If you consider using static IP addresses, it is not required to have or use a DHCP service.
Network security
All network traffic can be secured and can be configured in RHOCP. Authorization can be realized through internal RHOCP security or external LDAP-integrated security.
Network and storage
Planning for increased network traffic to shared storage must be considered and eventually isolated from the application network traffic. To achieve this goal, you can consider using multi -NIC (Network Interface) support for different networks in the RHOCP Nodes. Details are outlined in the section that discusses networking options.

Note: You can have multiple RHOCP clusters and traditional workload in one physical machine and the external load balancers take care of workload distribution.
Figure 1. Reference topology of network components for RHOCP integration in the enterprise The content of this image is described in the surrounding text.

The following section provides details of the architectural design considerations for your solution based on RHOCP.