Planning for your VM installation

Refer to the following notes and considerations before installing IBM® Concert on a virtual machine (VM).

Requirements

  • The virtual machine (VM) must be running Linux® x86_64.
  • The VM must meet the following sizing specifications: 16 cores, 32 GB RAM, and at least 512 GB of open disk space.
    • 16 cores
    • 32 GB RAM
    • 512 GB of open disk space (minimum)
  • Ensure that the VM configuration adheres to your organization's security requirements for the environment. Restrict access only to required personnel and only to what is necessary based on their role.
  • As a best practice, install Concert on your virtual machine as a non-root user. This approach reduces the risk of security breaches and system instability. Assign only one non-root user to manage the virtual machine deployment. No other operating system user should be granted file system access or access to the application containers.
    Warning: There is a known limitation where Podman containers terminate upon a non-root user ends a session or logs out of an application. This results in Concert being unavailable after the non-root user logs out. To workaround this issue, run the following command before restarting the containers.
    loginctl enable-linger <username>
    Refer to Known issues and limitations (VM deployments)
  • You must have a valid key to access the IBM Container Registry and pull the runtime images to your local machine. You can mirror the Concert images to your own private registry beforehand. During setup, you can pull from the private registry instead of the IBM Container Registry. Refer to Licenses and entitlements (OCP only) for instructions on how to generate the key required to access your container registry.
  • The default port setting for Concert is 12443.
  • You must have a Docker or Podman (version 4.3 or higher) installation that is supported for your Linux distribution. Refer to the Podman documentation or Docker documentation documentation for installation instructions.
    Supported container runtimes Minimum recommended version Notes
    Podman 4.4.5 CNI has been deprecated as a Podman networking plug-in switch to Netvark
    Docker Engine 24.0.5  
    Operating system (OS) Recommended container runtime Notes
    RHEL Podman (rootless)  
    Ubuntu Docker  
    SUSE Docker  

Refer to the following section for additional notes about using Podman or Docker when installing Concert on a VM.

Notes about Podman and Docker

  • Podman is recommended for machines that are running Red Hat® Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Docker is best for other package repositories (such as Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE) in which newer versions of Podman are not yet available.
  • Newer versions of RHEL do not support the use of Docker, though it can be installed from non-Red Hat repositories. Refer to this post for details.
  • Older versions of Podman are not recommended as some defects only manifest at runtime, not during Concert setup. Root-less configuration of Podman is highly recommended for security reasons.
  • For SUSE, Podman is only available with version SLES 15.4. Upgrade the system first by using zypper dist-upgrade before you install the dependencies that are required to install Docker (sysuser-shadow in SLES 12.5 and catatonit in SLES 15.5) or Podman (fuse-overlayfs in SLES 15.4). Download packages from the official SLES site.