Setting up the cluster and use a local image registry
You can store everything that you need to install Cloud Pak for Business Automation in a local registry and use this server for your deployment.
Before you begin
The following prerequisites are needed before you start your installation.
- An OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) cluster must be installed. For more information, see Option 1: Preparing your cluster for an online deployment.
- An image registry is used to store all images in your local registry, and must be available and
accessible from the OCP cluster nodes.
Make sure that the registry meets the following requirements:
- Supports Docker Manifest V2, Schema 2.
-
Supports multi-architecture images.Note: You must mirror all architecture images because image registries do not support sparse manifests (manifests that reference image digests outside of the package).Restriction: Do not use the OpenShift image registry as your local registry. The OpenShift registry does not support multi-architecture images.
- Is accessible from both the host and your OpenShift Container Platform cluster nodes.
- Has the username and password of a user who can write to the target registry from the host.
- Has the username and password of a user who can read from the target registry that is on the OpenShift cluster nodes.
- Allows path separators in the image name.
Create the following namespaces to store the Cloud Pak images.
- The
cp
namespace is for the images in the IBM Entitled Registry (cp.icr.io/cp
) that need an entitlement key and credentials to pull. The namespace must have a user who can write and create repositories, and read all repositories. - The
cpopen
namespace is for all images from theicr.io/cpopen
repository. Thecpopen
namespace is for publicly available images that are hosted by IBM that do not require credentials to pull.
Verify that each namespace meets the following requirements:
- Supports auto-repository creation.
- Has credentials of a user who can write and create repositories. The host uses these credentials.
- Has credentials of a user who can read all repositories. The OpenShift Container Platform cluster uses these credentials.
- The host of the image registry must be able to access the OCP cluster, an internal image
registry, and the internet. The host must be on a Linux®
x86_64 platform with any operating system that the IBM Cloud Pak® CLI and the OCP CLI support.
- Install the
oc
OCP CLI tool. For more information, see OCP CLI tools. - Install Podman on an RHEL machine. For more information, see Podman installation instructions.
- Download and install the most recent version of the
IBM Catalog Management Plug-in
.- Download the file based on the host operating system from IBM/ibm-pak-plugin/releases.
-
Extract the binary file by entering the following command:
tar -xf oc-ibm_pak-linux-amd64.tar.gz
- Run the following command to move the file to the /usr/local/bin
directory:
mv oc-ibm_pak-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/oc-ibm_pak
Note: If you are installing as a non-root user, you must usesudo
. - You can confirm that
oc ibm-pak -h
is installed by running the following command:oc ibm-pak --help
The plug-in usage is displayed.
- Make sure that the following network ports are available on the host.
- Install the
About this task
Your Cloud Pak deployment also includes Cloud Pak foundational services. Make sure that your cluster has capacity to install foundational services, see Preparing to install foundational services.
The following diagram shows what you need to configure to use a private image registry. The actions that you need to take to set up the environment are shown in 3 steps in the diagram.
- Save or fetch the case archive.
- Configure the credentials for the source and target registries, and then mirror the images.
- Configure an OCP cluster by installing the operator catalog and an instance of the Cloud Pak operator in a chosen namespace.

Procedure
What to do next
Continue to prepare everything that you need for each capability that you want to install in Preparing your chosen capabilities.