FAQs - Cloud offering

Read frequently asked questions about Product Master.

1. What is the role of the product team in the IBM® Product Master Hosted Cloud offering?

   The product team provisions only the offering and hand over the account details to the customer.

2. What type of deployment does the IBM Product Master cloud-hosted offering support?

   IBM Product Master cloud offering supports container-based deployment.

3. Does the offering support High-availability?

   Yes, the offering supports HA with multiple nodes on Kubernetes (Open source version).

4. What is the supported infrastructure?

   The new offering supports IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

5. Where is the database deployed?

   The database is deployed on a virtual machine (VM).

6. What plan does the offering support?

   The offering supports a basic level plan that has IBM Cloud Internet Services, Log Analysis, and Cloud tracker enabled.

7. Does the offering support upgrading the basic level plan?

   Yes, you can upgrade the basic level plan that is provided with the offering.

8. Does the offering support backup and recovery?

   Yes, the offering has IBM Spectrum® Protect for IBM Db2® database and Velero for Kubernetes backup solutions.

9. Which different T-shirt sizes are supported by the offering?

   The offering supports three T-shirt sizes: small, medium, and large.

10. Which environments does the offering support?

    The offering has separate Production, Staging, and DEV/QA environments.

11. Do all the environments support the same set of T-shirt sizes?
    No, following are the T-shirt size and environment-mapping details:

    • Large T-shirt size: Production, Staging, and DEV/QA environments
    • Small and medium T-shirt size: Production environment.
12. What do you need to provide to the product team?

    You need to provide an IBM Cloud account with administrative privileges for services required during provisioning.

13. How many subnets does a production environment have?

    The production environment has three subnets: Network policies (Subnet 1), High availability disaster recovery (HADR) cluster (Subnet 2), and IBM Spectrum Protect (Subnet 3).

14. What does the first subnet contain in a production environment?

    The first subnet contains Kubernetes Master VMs and Worker VMs.

15. Where are the product images installed?

    The product images are installed in subnet 1 under the Product Master namespace.

16. What does the second subnet contain in a production environment?

    The second subnet contains a primary and standby IBM Db2 database.

17. What does the third subnet contain in a production environment?

    The third subnet contains IBM Spectrum Protect that takes backup of subnet 2 databases.

18. What would Kubernetes use for product installation in the offering?

    Kubernetes uses Persistent Volumes (PV) on the IBM Cloud File Storage.

19. What does Persistent Volume contain?

    The Persistent Volume contains product data like logs, uploaded images, and imports.

20. Does IBM Spectrum Protect also backup File Storage?

    Yes, IBM Spectrum Protect also takes a backup of File Storage.

21. What is the difference in the network architecture for Production, Staging, and DEV/QA environments?

    The Staging and DEV/QA environments do not have IBM Spectrum Protect backup service, and the DEV/QA environment has only 1 primary IBM Db2 database.

22. Does the offering have the ability to display the public URL for the application?

    The offering has IBM Cloud load balancers and hence can display the public URL for the application.

23. How is infrastructure managed?

    You can manage infrastructure through a VPN connection.

24. What options does the VPN gateway provide in the offering?

    The VPN gateway provides you with an option of either site-to-site VPN or client-to-site VPN.

25. How many VMs does the Kubernetes system require?

    Kubernetes system requires 6 VMs for Production and Staging and 2 VMs for DEV/QA environments.

26. What does the Product Master namespace have after the installation?

    The Product Master namespace has primary, secondary, and third-party services.

27. What are the primary services in the Product Master namespace?

    Primary services include Admin UI, Persona-based UI, REST API, and Machine learning services.

28. What are the secondary services in the Product Master namespace?

    Secondary services include Workflow, Scheduler, PIM collector, and Indexer services.

29. What are the third-party services in the Product Master namespace?

    Third-party services include Elastic search, Hazelcast, IBM MQ, and MongoDB services.

30. What are the various monitoring and infrastructure tools that the offering uses?

    IBM Cloud Log Analysis service, IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service, IBM Cloud Internet Services, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Velero are the various monitoring and infrastructure tools that the offering uses.

31. What extra monitoring and infrastructure tool does the offering have?

    You can avail of ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer Premium Edition and ManageEngine Vulnerability Manager Plus tools at an extra cost with a services team that is managed by the Persistent Systems Limited.

32. What services and tools are used by the provisioning team?
    • VPC, IBM Cloud Virtual Servers, IBM Cloud Block Storage, IBM Cloud File Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Application load balancers, IBM Key Protect, VPN gateway, IBM Db2 database, and Kubernetes orchestration.
33. How do you download the Product Master Docker images?

    For operator-based accelerated installation, you can download Product Master Docker assets from the IBM Passport Advantage® or use a script to download the images from the IBM Support Fix Central. For more information, see Downloading images by using your own Docker registry .

34. How many docker images does the Product Master application have?

    The Product Master application has almost 13 different docker images.

35. How many YAML files do you download through the Product Master docker images?

    You download 7 different YAML files. For more information, see Types of YAML files.

36. How do you deploy the Product Master docker images on Kubernetes?

    You can follow the procedure that is listed in the Deploying on the Kubernetes cluster topic.

37. How can you upgrade a Kubernetes deployment to the latest version?

    You can follow the procedure that is listed in the Upgrading Product Master Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift deploymenttopic.

38. How is the Product Master deployed through a YAML file?

    You can follow the procedure that is listed in the Configuring Product Master deployment YAML (Fix Pack 7 and later) topic.

39. How is the database schema migrated?

    You can follow the procedure that is listed in the Creating or migrating database schema topic.