Installing cluster service

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The cluster service provides the capability to provision Red Hat® clusters to deploy on demand on the IBM® Sovereign Core platform.

Limitations

  • IBM Sovereign Core does not support exposing GPU resources to tenants. For hosts with GPUs, both Plane enablement options must be turned off.
  • The virtual IP subnet classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) cannot be changed after it is created. Make sure that the CIDR value is correct before you save the setting.

Before you begin

You must have the System owner role in the system account to install the cluster service.

Complete the following configuration steps:
Physical configuration
  • Bare metal setup: Provision and prepare bare metal machines, which are then discovered as agents in Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management (ACM).
  • Storage provisioning and configuration: Set up and configure the storage server required for cluster operations, create dedicated storage pools for each account, and prepare the necessary storage configuration settings.
  • Network preparation: Reserve and allocate the required IP addresses for cluster deployment.
Account configuration
Storage configurations and storage classes are defined and assigned per account.

Procedure

  1. You can access the cluster service in the following ways:
    • From the navigation menu, select Getting started. Select the Platform capabilities setup step and click Configure Cluster service.
    • From the navigation menu, select Platform capabilities and click Configure service for the Clusters capability.
  2. Configure host classes by specifying the following fields:
    Display name
    A user-friendly name displayed to end users in the Catalog UI.
    Agent classification label
    The label is defined in the AgentClassification resources in Red Hat® ACM and is automatically generated with the specification of each host type.
    Plane enablement
    Enable or disable planes for each host class.
    Note: If both planes are disabled, the host cannot be used for provisioning by tenants. The platform account has all classes available for control plane or worker node selection.
    Click Next.
  3. To configure Network Settings, complete the following steps.

    1. Virtual IP Subnet CIDR (Required)

      Specify the CIDR notation of the Virtual IP subnet to be used by this service.

      This subnet defines the IP address range from which Virtual IPs (VIPs) are allocated for an Red Hat OpenShift cluster. The Virtual IP subnet must be a subset of the Machine Network subnet . Ensure that the specified range does not conflict with other IP address allocations in the environment.

    2. Reserved IP CIDRs (Optional)

      Specify one or more CIDR ranges within the Virtual IP subnet that should be reserved.

      IP addresses defined in this field are excluded from allocation and will not be assigned as Virtual IPs. Use this option to prevent allocation of IP addresses that are already in use or must remain unavailable.

      Multiple CIDR ranges can be specified, separated by commas.

    3. Click Next.
  4. Set the Show service globally toggle to make the service available in all tenant accounts. Click Finish to publish the service to the catalog.

What to do next

The cluster service is set up and ready to use. You can provision multiple clusters or update existing cluster configuration as needed to meet tenant users' requirements.

Tenant users can now deployed clusters on demand from the catalog in their accounts. For details, see Provisioning clusters.