Upgrading Red Hat OpenShift

IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration 2022.4 supports Red Hat OpenShift 4.10 and 4.12. There is no required upgrade of OpenShift beyond version 4.10, but you do have the option to upgrade to OpenShift 4.12.

Note: If you are running your cluster on managed OpenShift, such as IBM Cloud, refer to your managed service provider's documentation for OpenShift upgrades, instead of the guidance here.

Before you begin

Review these requirements and prerequisites before proceeding with the upgrade of OpenShift.

  • This task must be performed by a cluster administrator. For more information, see Roles and permissions.

  • The OpenShift upgrade process requires users to transition through the intermediate OpenShift versions, for example, when upgrading OpenShift from 4.10 to 4.12, you must upgrade through each OpenShift version (4.10 > 4.11 > 4.12).

    • Each intermediate upgrade may take a few hours, so plan accordingly.

    • The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Update Graph has a tool that provides the appropriate minor versions to use through the intermediate updates. Click the Update Path tile to access. You need Red Hat customer account credentials to get access to the tool.

  • Cloud Pak for Integration will continue to be supported as the cluster goes through the process of upgrading OpenShift versions. However, the expectation is that you will complete the upgrade within a reasonable period of time, and that the cluster will not run on an intermediate version (such as OpenShift 4.11) indefinitely.

  • You need to upgrade your storage solutions, including (if you are using it) Red Hat® OpenShift® Data Foundation (ODF), as you upgrade the OpenShift versions. For example, an upgrade to OpenShift 4.11 needs to be followed by an upgrade of ODF to 4.11. For each transition, see the following links to the OpenShift documentation. To upgrade from:

Upgrading to OpenShift version 4.12.

Prerequisites: If you want to upgrade to version 4.12:

  • Wait until all required steps for upgrading to IBM Cloud Pak for Integration 2022.4 are complete.

  • Ensure that you are on the latest fixpack for the 2022.4 release before upgrading version 4.10 to 4.12.

To upgrade OpenShift to version 4.12, follow the procedure in Updating a cluster by using the web console or Updating a cluster by using the CLI.

Troubleshooting

  • imageContentSource policies are lost during upgrade of OpenShift on IBM Cloud

    Symptom: Upgrading OpenShift removes image content source policies.

    Cause: ImageContentSourcePolicy (ICSP) holds cluster-wide information about how to handle registry mirror rules. When multiple policies are defined, the outcome of the behavior is defined on each field. For more information, see ImageContentSourcePolicy in the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

    Debugging and solution:

    1. Create an ImageContentSourcePolicy on the cluster, so that theImageContentSourcePolicy is propagated to the nodes.

    2. On each node, log in and search for this file:

      cat /host/etc/containers/registries.conf

      If this file exists on the node but contains only a subset of the rules that are defined in the ImageContentSourcePolicy, reapply the ICSPs.

  • An API is removed when upgrading OpenShift to 4.9

    Symptom: When upgrading OpenShift from 4.8 to 4.9, you get a warning that the ingresses.v1beta1.extensions API is removed in 4.9.

    Cause: The removal of this API is documented for Ingress in the Kubernetes documentation.

    Solution: This error is benign, because all Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities use the networking.k8s.io/v1 instead. You can proceed with the upgrade; no further action is required.