Preparing your cluster for an air-gapped (offline) deployment on OCP
About this task
The IBM Catalog Management Plug-in or ibm-pak
for short, uses standard
tooling for registry and cluster access. A CASE (Container Application Software for Enterprise)
package specifies the composition of the product and the images that must be copied into an
air-gapped environment.
The following diagram shows the steps that are involved in installing with an air-gap environment on OCP.

It is common in production to have a cluster that cannot access the internet. In these cases, you can still install FileNet Content Manager and OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) in an air-gapped (otherwise known as offline or disconnected) environment. An air-gapped installation uses the IBM operator catalog to mimic a typical online installation except that the images are in your own registry. You can use a bastion host or a compute device (like a laptop), with or without portable storage (like an external hard disk drive) to transfer the images to an air-gapped network.
All of these scenarios use Container Application Software for Enterprises (CASE) files to mirror content from a source to a target. CASE is a specification that defines metadata and structure for packaging, managing, and unpacking containerized applications.
The following diagram provides an overview of the air-gapped installation options.

What to do next
Use the following steps to prepare your air-gapped installation. Follow the steps in order and use the What to do next sections to help you move to the next step.