Preparing a cluster to use Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO)

Prepare your cluster on ARO so you can install IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration.

Requirements

To set up an ARO cluster, you need:

  • Access to the Azure portal (requires email invitation)

  • Access to a Red Hat account (requires email invitation)

Creating your cluster

The following steps are based on the Microsoft tutorial for creating an ARO cluster: Tutorial: Create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster

Prerequisites: Azure Red Hat OpenShift requires a minimum of 40 cores to create and run an OpenShift cluster. You will need to adjust for this, as the default Azure resource quota for a new Azure subscription does not meet this requirement.

  1. In the Azure CLI, run the following command:

    az login

  2. On the browser page that opens, log in.

  3. On the tutorial page, follow the steps under “Get a Red Hat pull secret”.

  4. Set environment variables to be used by az commands. You can replace the values with your own names. For example:

    LOCATION=eastus        # location of your cluster
RESOURCEGROUP=aro-rg   # resource group where to create cluster
CLUSTER=<cluster_name> # name of your cluster

  5. Create a resource group:

    az group create \
    --name $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --location $LOCATION

  6. Create a virtual network in the resource group. OpenShift 4 requires two empty subnets, one for master nodes and one for worker nodes:

    az network vnet create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --name aro-vnet \
    --address-prefixes 10.0.0.0/22

  7. Add an empty subnet for the master nodes:

    az network vnet subnet create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --vnet-name aro-vnet \
    --name master-subnet \
    --address-prefixes 10.0.0.0/23 \
    --service-endpoints Microsoft.ContainerRegistry

  8. Add an empty subnet for the worker nodes:

    az network vnet subnet create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --vnet-name aro-vnet \
    --name worker-subnet \
    --address-prefixes 10.0.2.0/23 \
    --service-endpoints Microsoft.ContainerRegistry

  9. Disable subnet private endpoint policies on the master subnet. This is required for connecting to the cluster and managing it:

    az network vnet subnet update \
    --name master-subnet \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --vnet-name aro-vnet \
    --disable-private-link-service-network-policies true

  10. Create the cluster.

    For OpenShift Data Foundation in a production environment, the optimal minimum deployment is 4 storage nodes, with 3 Object Storage Daemons (OSDs) on each node. This provides much greater data resiliency in the event of any OSD failures.

    To create the cluster, run the following command, replacing the placeholder values with values applicable to your installation:

    az aro create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --name $CLUSTER \
    --vnet <vnet_name> \
    --master-subnet <master_subnet_name> \
    --worker-subnet <worker_subnet_name> \
    --worker-vm-size <worker_vm_size> \
    --pull-secret @/<file_path>/<pull_secret_file>

    Note that the value for pull-secret is the path to the file containing the pull secret you obtained in step 3 (the Red Hat tutorial).

    For example:

    az aro create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --name $CLUSTER \
    --vnet aro-vnet \
    --master-subnet master-subnet \
    --worker-subnet worker-subnet \
    --worker-vm-size Standard_D16s_v3 \
    --pull-secret @/path/pull_secret.txt

    When the command has finished running, your cluster is ready to use.

Connecting to your cluster

After the cluster is created, follow the instructions in the next Microsoft tutorial to connect to your cluster: Tutorial: Connect to an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster

  1. Get login information:

    az aro list-credentials \
    --name $CLUSTER \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP

  2. Get the web console URL:

    az aro show \
    --name $CLUSTER \
    --resource-group $RESOURCEGROUP \
    --query "consoleProfile.url" -o tsv

    From here you can download the OpenShift CLI from the web console using the ? button at the top right of the page.

  3. Log in to the OpenShift CLI

    apiServer=$(az aro show -g $RESOURCEGROUP -n $CLUSTER --query apiserverProfile.url -o tsv)
oc login $apiServer -u kubeadmin -p kubeadmin_passwd