Onboarding VANs as Mesh network segments

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If you have an existing Red Hat® Service Interconnect® virtual application network (VAN) that you want to manage in IBM® Hybrid Cloud Mesh (Mesh), you must first onboard the VAN as a Mesh network segment.

Before you begin

Mesh network segments are known as virtual application networks (VANs) in Red Hat Service Interconnect. Gateways are known as sites in Red Hat Service Interconnect.

Before you onboard an existing VAN, check the following items:
  • The applications and services in the VAN are deployed and running in their namespaces.
  • The applications and services are connected and functioning correctly as part of a Red Hat Service Interconnect deployment.
  • The clouds, locations, and deployment environments are registered in Mesh.
  • A flow collector is installed for at least one site in the VAN to gather network traffic metrics.
  • The service-sync property in the site ConfigMap is set to the same value for all the sites in the VAN. If the sites have different values for this property, the onboarding fails to complete.
  • If service-sync is set to false for all VAN sites and a service is exposed on a site, ensure that a proxy service exists on another site in the VAN to enable communication with the service. If a proxy service doesn’t exist, Mesh does not create a connection policy when the VAN is onboarded.

About this task

For information about the versions of Red Hat Service Interconnect that Mesh supports for onboarding, see Supported platforms and software.

To start the onboarding of an existing VAN, use the Mesh CLI to install an Open Horizon agent for each site in the VAN. For each agent that is successfully installed, a new unmanaged gateway is created automatically in Mesh. To complete the onboarding of the VAN, use the Mesh console to associate each gateway with a Mesh cluster.

Procedure

  1. Install an Open Horizon agent for each site in the VAN that you are onboarding. See Installing an Open Horizon agent.
    The agent is installed in the site's namespace and a Service Interconnect edge gateway is automatically registered in Mesh. The new gateway is listed on the Unmanaged gateways tab on the Gateways list page.

    For example, if the VAN has three sites, three new gateways are registered in Mesh. The Mesh Manager detects that these gateways relate to a VAN that is not already managed by Mesh and begins the onboarding of the VAN.

  2. Monitor the onboarding of the VAN by clicking Onboard network segment on the Network segments page in the Mesh console.
    In the View and associate your gateways pane, the network segments that are onboarding to Mesh are displayed. The network segments are split into two categories, based on the onboarding status:
    • A named network segment is displayed when an Open Horizon agent is successfully installed for each gateway in the network segment. Mesh automatically assigns a name to the network segment based on one of its gateways, but you can change the name to a more meaningful value.
    • The Unknown network segment category shows the gateways that are onboarding but have connections to other gateways that are not onboarding yet. When all the sites in the VAN are onboarding and the gateways are ready to be associated with a cluster, Mesh creates a named network segment that contains all the connected gateways.

    The following screen capture shows an example of network segments that are onboarding. The east-gateway network segment has three gateways. An agent was installed for each gateway and the gateways were successfully registered in Mesh.


    Onboarding network segments page with the network segments that are onboarding to Mesh
    Tip: You can also use the Gateways and Gateway details pages to monitor the onboarding of the VAN and connect the gateways to your clusters.
  3. Complete the onboarding of the named network segments by associating each gateway with a Mesh cluster. For each gateway, click Associate cluster to select a cluster and application group.
    Attention: You cannot manage the network segment in Mesh until all the gateways are associated to clusters and the network segment is fully onboarded. While the network segment is onboarding, do not modify the network segment with the Mesh CLI or in the Mesh console.

    After a gateway is successfully connected to a cluster, all applications within the namespace are automatically discovered and registered into the application group that you select.

    Mesh also creates remote connections to represent links between the sites in the VAN and connection policies to represent each of the services that are exposed.

  4. Check whether any events were created during the onboarding of the VANs by viewing the Events page in the Mesh console.
    For example, you might see the following events:
    • If a flow collector is not installed for at least one site in the VAN, the VAN is onboarded to Mesh but metrics collection is not enabled. A no flow collector was found at any site event is created.
    • If the sites in the VAN have different values for the service-sync property, the onboarding fails to complete and a Service Sync was not consistent across all sites event is created.

Results

The Red Hat Service Interconnect VAN is onboarded to Mesh as a managed network segment.

What to do next

View the new network segment on the Network segment details page, including its gateways, applications, namespaces, and connection policies.

In the Topology view or in Grafana, view metrics about the traffic between applications and services in the network segment.

Use the Topology view to visualize the relationships between the locations, deployment environments, gateways, and associated applications and services in the network segment.