Deploying IBM Fusion HCI System

This topic describes the IBM Fusion HCI System planning and installation. It also includes prerequisites that you need for a successful setup and installation of IBM Fusion HCI System.

The IBM Fusion HCI System comes with a bootstrapping software from the factory. The IBM Service Support Representatives (SSR) complete the initial verification and physically connect the system to network and power. Then, they setup the network of the appliance, which connects the appliance to the data centre network. This procedure configures network for all the appliance switches and nodes (three controllers). If you ordered more nodes, then they get installed as well. After this network setup completes, the installation link for the next stage is shared with you to install IBM Fusion HCI System that consists of three nodes Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster installation followed by IBM Fusion software installation.

The IBM Fusion HCI System installation wizard provides a seamless and accelerated experience to get the system up and running with a few clicks. It progressively gathers the information in the following stages of IBM Fusion HCI System installation:
  1. In the Network Setup wizard stage (stage 1), the SSR, in collaboration with your network administrator, configures switches, VLANs, aggregating links, and validates DHCP and DNS configuration. Your NTP server is also configured on each node as a hardware clock.
  2. In the Software installation wizard stage (stage 2), you can continue with the installation from a remote host by using the details that are provided at the end of the previous stage (Network setup). In this stage, you accept the license agreement contracts, provide the image registry details, optionally customize the Red Hat OpenShift and storage network details, and optionally configure a custom certificate for OpenShift Ingress. At the end of this stage, IBM Fusion HCI System completes the installation of three nodes OpenShift cluster and management software.
Post the installation of stages, you can do the following next steps:
  1. Proceed to add more nodes to the cluster.
  2. Configure Fusion Data Foundation or Global Data Platform storage on the cluster.
  3. Install IBM Fusion services of your choice.

If you want to bring your own rack, contact IBM Support.