Cloud Pak for Business Automation

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Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

  • 1.  Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Thu November 12, 2020 11:07 AM
    Hi 

    What kind experiences you people have with this operator and pattern based deployment? Are things working smoothly and fast? I am little bit struggling with AWS based environment with problems with podman( solved) and now with using gp2 as storage class. I am using latest  20.0.2.1 resources from cert-kubernetes github. Missing good old debugging and logs option.

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    -Timo-Joel
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  • 2.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    IBM Champion
    Posted Fri November 13, 2020 09:34 AM
    I find the Operator's logs to be quite useful as it's running Ansible it outputs detailed information about what it's doing and tracking down the specific failure is fairly straight forward.

    Kubernetes is definitely a learning curve, though. It's important to check all the instructions because there are a few secrets, etc., that need to be created manually to store db passwords, etc. I've found that once I understand how my K8s cluster is set up, getting the CP4Auto deploy to work is pretty straight forward. But we got stuck a lot the first few tries because we weren't understanding how our specific Ingress setup worked or storage like you described.

    I did find that things were smoother and easier using a standard OpenShift cluster than when I tried other kinds of K8s (even something like IBM's ROKS was quirky).

    Definitely a brave new world...

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    Eric Walk
    Senior Technical Architect

    O: 617-453-9984 M: 617-855-9255 | NASDAQ: PRFT | Perficient.com
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Fri November 13, 2020 10:05 AM
    Yep for sure. OC logs , descripe etc are familiar to me.   In this case I found that operator is not even deployed since default gp2 storage class has volume binding mode 'WaitForFirstConsumer'. I created new one with binding mode 'Immediate' but it complains about invalid AccessModes [ReadWriteMany]: only AccessModes [ReadWriteOnce] are supported. So still no smooth operator for me. Have IBM tested CP4Auto deployment patterns in AWS ? Maybe I contine NFS Server on linux  and create storage class against it.. Afraid to continue beta testing what happens with AWS EFS. But like always after a good fight you grow and learn as a specialist. Lets see what happens next 

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    Timo-Joel Piippola
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    IBM Champion
    Posted Fri November 13, 2020 10:28 AM
    Oh... I know what the issue is...

    You're trying to use Elastic Block Storage gp2. Yeah, so if you need a RWM persistent volume that means it needs to be NFS or equivalent, i.e. something multiple containers can share. EBS is RWO b/c only one container can use it at a time...

    So on AWS you'd want to use EFS or S3.

    I don't know exactly what they test other than generally OpenShift.

    ------------------------------
    Eric Walk
    Senior Technical Architect

    O: 617-453-9984 M: 617-855-9255 | NASDAQ: PRFT | Perficient.com
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed November 18, 2020 11:38 AM
    Hi Timo-Joel.

    We are using AWS EFS storage for the PVC's and it's working 100%.

    have a look here how to provision for OCP on AWS:

    https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.5/storage/persistent_storage/persistent-storage-efs.html

    Regards,
    Jaco

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    Jaco Grobler
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Tue September 07, 2021 01:54 PM
    Hi Jaco, I'm hitting the same problem than Time-Joel.
    Trying to deploy CP4A operator on OCP on AWS we use dynamic storage class gp2 because it does not support ReadWriteMany.
    Now AWS provides another storage class named gp2-csi, but the the result is the same.

    I found this thread looking for a walk around, however, looks like the link you're pointing does not exist anymore in OCP 4.8. 
    ¿Do you know a way of having an storageClass on AWS that supports ReadWriteMany for OCP 4.8?

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    Eduardo Izquierdo Lázaro
    Automation Architect
    DECIDE
    MADRID
    +34609893677
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed September 08, 2021 03:09 AM

    Hi Eduardo,

    have you tried to use Elastic FILE storage (EFS)?
    I haven't tried it myself but according to the AWS documentation it supports the RWX access mode and it is supported by OCP as well.
    https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.8/security/container_security/security-storage.html

    Block storage provided by hyperscalers like AWS, Google or Microsoft typically only allow RWO which is not sufficient for using it with CP4BA as some of our containers need to have a shared volume which can be accessed concurrently in writing mode.

    Let me know if you have further questions.

    Best regards,
    Michael




    ------------------------------
    Michael Kirchner
    Leading Technical Specialist - Digital Business Automation
    IBM Technology
    Germany
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    Original Message


  • 8.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed September 08, 2021 03:29 AM
    Hi Michael,

    Could you get an official statement for us on EFS. It is not listed under the storage section in die openshift documentation.

    https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.7/storage/persistent_storage/persistent-storage-nfs.html

    Regards,
    Jaco

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    Jaco Grobler
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    Original Message


  • 9.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed September 08, 2021 03:11 AM
    Hi Guys,

    Yes unfortunately the official statement form Redhat is that the only supported storage for OCP is at this stage Openshift Container Storage.

    Regards,
    Jaco
    South Africa

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    Jaco Grobler
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    Original Message


  • 10.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed September 08, 2021 03:17 PM
      |   view attached
    Apparently EFS is not supported as storage from OCP 4.6 onward. AzureFile is easy to set up as a RWX access mode storage for ICP4BA set up. If multi-cloud set up is not something that is feasible, you could create a storage gateway (NFS Server) in AWS and provision PVC. I was able to get ICP4BA 20.x and 21.x working with this configuration.

    Attached is the screen shot of Storage Gateway setup, that may help.

    Thanks

    ------------------------------
    Shrikanth Dhubakunta
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    Original Message


  • 11.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Tue November 24, 2020 06:21 AM

    I was able to continue with AWS EFS. Now met another challenge using demo pattern baa or content.  DB2 ldap container is crashing since ldap daemon slapd is not able to start.. 

    Starting Supervisor slapd: ERROR (spawn error)
    Import default LDAP schemas
    ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
    ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
    ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
    ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)

    Cannot access pods shell since it is crashing right away. 
    Tried already to open inbound to security group in aws. 
    Ldap service is created in namespace
    Anyone seen same problem and been able to fix it? 



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    Timo-Joel Piippola
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    Original Message


  • 12.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    Posted Wed November 25, 2020 01:23 AM
    We had similar issues with the demo deploy on Azure. We ended up doing a enterprise build with a standalone db install on ubuntu.

    Jaco

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    Jaco Grobler
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    Original Message


  • 13.  RE: Cloud Pak for Automation deployment

    IBM Champion
    Posted Wed November 25, 2020 08:22 AM
    I ended up doing the same, db2 just barely works in a container right now, a separate db and ldap have fewer potential problems.

    ------------------------------
    Eric Walk
    Senior Technical Architect

    O: 617-453-9984 M: 617-855-9255 | NASDAQ: PRFT | Perficient.com
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    Original Message