Supported options on Microsoft Azure

Installation options

Cloud Pak for Integration runs on any OpenShift environment on Azure. This includes but is not limited to:

• A cluster deployed manually, using Installer Provisioned Infrastructure or User Provisioned Infrastructure.

• A managed OpenShift cluster from a cloud provider, including:

  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift. See Tutorial: Create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster for more information.

  • IBM Cloud Satellite. See Getting started with IBM Cloud Satellite for more information.

For overview information on installing an OpenShift cluster for use with an IBM Cloud Pak, see Installing OpenShift Container Platform clusters.

Storage

When running Cloud Pak for Integration on Microsoft Azure, you can use any of the "Recommended storage providers" in Storage considerations. However, using Azure Disk and Azure Files provide the combination of best performance and most cost-effective solution.

Because instances that are RWO-based provide built-in replication, it is not necessary to use a cross-availability zone (AZ) replicated RWO storage provider (such as ODF, Portworx, or IBM Storage Fusion). Using such storage providers in Microsoft Azure can result in substantial additional costs for network data transfer between AZs, as well as reduced performance that is caused by unnecessary data replication.

The following table lists a subset of common storage providers that can be used with Microsoft Azure, and the compatibility of each instance type with these storage options:

• Azure managed disks (Azure Disk)

• Azure file shares (Azure Files)

• OpenShift Data Foundation (formerly OpenShift Container Storage) *

• Portworx

* For OpenShift Data Foundation in a production environment, the optimal minimum deployment is 4 storage nodes, with 3 Object Storage Daemons (OSDs) on each node. This provides much greater data resiliency in the event of any OSD failures.

Table of compatible supported storage options for Microsoft Azure by instance type