Installing FTM in an air-gapped environment
You can do an air-gapped installation of the FTM solutions when your Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster cannot access an external network.
It is common in a production environment to have a Red Hat OpenShift cluster that cannot access the internet. In these cases, you can still install FTM in an air-gapped, offline, or disconnected environment. An air-gapped installation uses the IBM® operator catalog to mimic a typical online installation but with the Cloud Pak images in your own registry. You can use a bastion host or a compute device such as a laptop to transfer the images to an air-gapped network.
If your cluster is not connected to the internet, you can use the IBM Catalog Management Plug-in for IBM Cloud Paks to install your FTM solution in an air-gapped environment. Use a bastion host to transfer the images to your air-gapped environment.
- Your Red Hat OpenShift cluster must be installed.
- A container registry must be available and accessible from the Red Hat OpenShift cluster nodes. For more information, see Prepare a container registry.
The sole result of this air-gapped installation process is that the operator for the FTM solutions is available to be installed in Red Hat OpenShift. After you finish this installation, you must still deploy your FTM solution to Red Hat OpenShift. This deployment includes doing the prerequisite tasks that are needed before the operator is installed. For more information about deploying your FTM solution, see Deploy to Red Hat OpenShift.
The following topics provide more information about the steps in the air-gapped installation.