Supported Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes version

Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, and 2.8 are supported.

IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management supports integration with Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for providing end-to-end management visibility and control to manage your Kubernetes environment. For more information about Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, see the OpenShift documentation Opens in a new tab.

Important: To integrate IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management with Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, your cluster must be on Linux® x86_64. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management is not supported on Linux® on Power® (ppc64le) and Linux® on IBM Z® and LinuxONE platforms.

You can install IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management on a cluster that has Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, or 2.8. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management needs to be installed under the default namespace open-cluster-management.

By using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you gain access to the cluster, application, governance, and compliance capabilities within Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management in addition to existing hybrid application and hybrid governance, compliance, and risk capabilities within IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

The Monitoring module requires the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management observability service. When you have completed the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management installation, you must create an instance of the observability service (multicluster-observability-operator), and change the retention values. For more information, see the Enabling the observability service in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management topic.

Upgrading process

It is recommended to install IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management 2.3.x with Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, or 2.8.

Note: Because IBM Cloud Pak foundational services 3.6 doesn't support Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3, you need to upgrade IBM Cloud Pak foundational services to version 3.12 before you upgrade Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to 2.3.

If you upgraded Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, or 2.8, you need to delete the job sre-inventory-inventory-redis-secret-job, wait for it to complete, and restart the sre-inventory-inventory-rhacmcollector-xx pod. Use either of the following ways:

Integration process

To integrate with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you must install Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management on your cluster, then install the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. When you install IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, Multicloud Management Core is disabled by default (mcmCoreDisabled is set to true by default). The following capabilities in the following areas are disabled and the equivalent Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management capability is available instead:

Hybrid application and hybrid governance, compliance, and risk capabilities are not disabled.

For more information about installation, see:

Single sign-on and role-based access

If you are using Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes with IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, you must configure the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management Identity and Access Management (IAM) as an OpenShift OAuth identity provider. For more information, see Configuring single sign-on for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

This configuration allows your users to use the IAM service for single sign-on between IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management and Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and to control user access within each console. For example, with this single sign-on a user with Cluster Administrator access in IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management has the same level of access to complete tasks within Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

After single sign-on is configured, you can use the IAM service within IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management to create teams, assign users, and assign user roles. The created users and users roles are shared through the configured LDAP connection to allow access in Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

For example, a user with the Cluster Administrator role uses the Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes UI to import a managed cluster to the hub cluster. The user is then given the following cluster roles:

myname@us.ibm.com@myname-mydevice Downloads % oc get clusterroles | grep nutmeg
open-cluster-management:admin:nutmegs                                             102m
open-cluster-management:managedcluster:nutmegs                                    102m
open-cluster-management:view:nutmegs                                              102m
system:open-cluster-management:managedcluster:bootstrap:nutmegs                   102m

The Cluster Administrator can then use the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management console to bind a namespace to the user from the Identity and Access Management (IAM) dashboard. After the namespace binding, the Cluster Administrator can bind the managed cluster role to the user and grant the user access to the managed cluster. For accessing the cluster, there are two levels of access:

For more information about the IAM service and managing teams and users, see:

Importing clusters

When you are integrated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and have the Multicloud Management Core disabled, you need to use Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to import managed clusters into your hub cluster. Clusters that are imported with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management are automatically detected by IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management and can be viewed within the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management console.

For more information about importing clusters with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, see Importing a cluster.

If you are working within the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management console, you can launch Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to import a cluster. From the _Clusters_dashboard in IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, clicking to create or import a cluster launches Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

Application management

If you have IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management integrated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you can choose to use the application management capabilities within Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management instead of the hybrid application management capabilities that are available with IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

The application management capabilities within IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management still function. For instance, you can create subscriptions, channels, and other Kubernetes application resources in IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. Any Kubernetes-based application resources that you create in either IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management or Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management are automatically detected within the other product. However, non-Kubernetes based resources, such as hybrid deployables and hybrid applications are not detected by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. You can only create, view, and manage hybrid applications and any associated hybrid deployables within IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. For instance, you can only use the Hybrid Application Model within IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management to manage infrastructure as application resources.

For more information about hybrid applications and managing applications in IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, see Managing hybrid applications.

If you do choose to use the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management application management capabilities, refer to the Red Hat product documentation for details on creating and managing your applications and associated resources. For more information, see Managing applications (Red Hat) Opens in a new tab.

Known issues

If you are planning to integrate with, and use, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to replace or augment IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management capabilities, ensure that you review the known issues that are related to the integration. For more information, see Known issues.