Storage requirements

Your environment must meet persistent storage requirements for WebSphere Automation.

Storage requirements

Ensure that your Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster has a supported persistent storage External link icon in an encrypted persistent volume. By default, the product installation uses dynamic storage provisioning. The product database requires ReadWriteOnce access mode. The security components require more storage with ReadWriteMany access mode. The health components also require separate storage with ReadWriteMany access mode. The Platform UI requires ReadWriteMany access mode.

The Events data store requires enough space for storing all WebSphere Automation events within a 7 day duration, by default. To avoid out of space issues, run with a StorageClass using allowVolumeExpansion set to true and/or size higher by setting the .spec.events.kafka.storage.size field to a larger value during initial creation of the WebSphereAutomation custom resource instance.

The default storage settings are valid for most scenarios. However, if your storage configuration requires different permissions or other settings, see WebSphereAutomation custom resource for options. For health-specific storage configuration, see WebSphereHealth custom resource.

When you configure health-specific storage, encrypt the file system where investigations are stored to protect sensitive information about your servers. Encryption is important if your WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Application Server Liberty servers use Java™ HotSpot VM because WebSphere Automation collects hprof files to analyze memory leaks.

Ensure that the cluster is configured with a default storage class that satisfies the requirements, otherwise specify the StorageClass name in the custom resource. For more information on setting up the default storage class, see Changing the default storage class External link icon in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform documentation.

Use one of the persistent storage options for your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

Note: Network File System (NFS) is not a supported storage provider. If you install WebSphere Automation in a Single Node OpenShift (SNO) cluster for a proof-of-concept (POC), it is possible to use NFS as the storage provider, but you cannot transition this configuration into a production environment; you must instead use a supported storage provider from Table 1. For more information, see Installing on a single node OpenShift (SNO) cluster.

Table 1. Supported storage options
Host	Storage	Configuration notes
On premises	IIBM Storage Fusion software*	Install Fusion Data Foundation and configure Fusion Data Foundation.
	Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation	Use with or without encryption .
	Rook Caph
	Portworx
IBM Cloud®	IBM Cloud File Storage Gold class `ibmc-file-gold-gid`	Use a classic OpenShift cluster.
IBM Cloud®	IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks IBM Spectrum Fusion/ Scale (ideal for RWX)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)	Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation	Use with or without encryption .
	Amazon Cloud Object Storage (S3)
	Amazon Elastic File Storage (EFS) for RWX mode access

* Entitlement includes IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation (FDF), but not Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF). Use of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation with WebSphere Automation and IBM Storage Fusion software requires separate entitlement from Red Hat.