Installing the IBM MQ Operator on Amazon EKS

You can install the IBM® MQ Operator onto Amazon EKS by using a provided Helm chart.

Before you begin

Important: These instructions are for online installations of the IBM MQ Operator on Amazon EKS only. For installations in an air-gap environment on Amazon EKS, see Installing the IBM MQ Operator on Amazon EKS in an air-gap environment. For installations on Red Hat® OpenShift®, see Installing the IBM MQ Operator on Red Hat OpenShift.

To ensure that your installation goes as smoothly as possible, make sure that you understand all of the prerequisites and requirements before you start your installation. See Planning for IBM MQ in containers.

The IBM MQ Operator must be installed by a cluster administrator.

kubectl: the Kubernetes CLI tool
Helm v3 or v4: a Kubernetes application management tool

If you intend to install IBM MQ queue managers that use persistent storage, ensure that a Storage Class is defined in your cluster.

About this task

For information about the versions of Amazon EKS that the IBM MQ Operator is supported on, see the Containers tab of the relevant IBM MQ system requirements page.

The provided Helm chart deploys an IBM MQ Operator Deployment into a namespace. The QueueManager CRD is deployed from this chart only if a version of it does not already exist in the cluster.

The IBM MQ Operator deploys by default with 1 CPU core and 1 GB memory.

Each IBM MQ queue manager defaults to 1 CPU core and 1 GB memory but can be run with fewer resources with lower performance

Procedure

Provide access to the Helm chart, by using one of the following options:
- Option 1: Use the IBM Helm chart repository
  - If you already added the IBM Helm chart to your local repository, run the following command to update it:
```
helm repo update ibm-helm
```
  - If you did not add the IBM Helm chart to your local repository, run the following command:
```
helm repo add ibm-helm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IBM/charts/master/repo/ibm-helm
```
- Option 2: Download and extract the IBM MQ Operator Helm chart package.
  1. Go to the GitHub repo for IBM Helm charts, ibm-helm.
  2. Locate the Helm chart archive that has a name beginning with ibm-mq-operator. For example, ibm-mq-operator-4.0.2.tgz.
  3. Download the chart to your local machine.
  4. Extract the IBM MQ Operator Helm chart .tgz file then enter the directory. Run the following command, replacing <IBM_MQ_OPERATOR_HELM_CHART>.tgz with the file that you downloaded:
```
tar -xvzf <IBM_MQ_OPERATOR_HELM_CHART>.tgz
cd ibm-mq-operator/
```
Optional: If you want to override any of the default values for the IBM MQ Operator configuration properties, create an overrides file.
The properties and their default values are described in IBM MQ Operator Helm chart values. The default values are set in the values.yaml file in the Helm chart package. To override the default values, create a new file called overrides.yaml, then add to that file the properties that you want to override, along with their new values. You will specify the overrides.yaml file when you install the IBM MQ Operator.
For example, you could use the overrides file to set the install mode for the IBM MQ Operator to AllNamespaces:
```
operator:
    installMode: "AllNamespaces"
```
(The default installMode value is OwnNamespace, which means that the IBM MQ Operator operates at a single namespace scope. The installMode AllNamespaces means that the IBM MQ Operator operates at a cluster scope.)
Install the IBM MQ Operator.
The command to use varies depending on how you accessed the Helm chart in step 1. In the following commands, replace <NAMESPACE> with your desired namespace and omit the --values overrides.yaml parameter if you did not create an overrides.yaml file in the previous step:
- Option 1: If you are using the IBM Helm chart repository:
```
helm install ibm-mq-operator ibm-helm/ibm-mq-operator --namespace <NAMESPACE> --values overrides.yaml
```
- Option 2: If you downloaded the IBM MQ Operator Helm chart:
```
helm install ibm-mq-operator --namespace <NAMESPACE> --values overrides.yaml .
```
Note: If you prefer not to use an override file, you can instead override default values directly from these commands, by replacing the --values overrides.yaml parameter with the --set <FIELD>=<VALUE> parameter.
Confirm the successful installation of the IBM MQ Operator:
```
helm list
kubectl get pods -n <NAMESPACE>
```
Deploy the IBM License Service.
The IBM License Service is required for monitoring license usage of queue managers. Follow the procedure in Preparing to use Kubernetes by installing the IBM License Service.
Deploy a queue manager.

For instructions for deploying an example "quick start" queue manager, see Deploying a simple queue manager using the IBM MQ Operator on Amazon EKS.