Easy deployment of OpenShift on PowerVS - Powered by the OpenShift Installer
New to IBM Cloud is the OpenShift Quickstart for the Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone deployable architecture, available here. If you are interested in experiencing the benefits of OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on IBM Power, but want a simple way to deploy it, this solution is perfect.
Deployable architectures provide automated ways to deploy common solutions on IBM Cloud with the click of a button. IBM Cloud has offered a powerful Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone deployable architecture for quite some time, but a quickstart option for OpenShift is now offered with it. This deploys a standard Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone and then triggers an install of OpenShift inside of it using the OpenShift Installer. The OpenShift Installer is capable of provisioning all the necessary infrastructure for an OpenShift cluster, creating your servers, networks, and more based on a user’s desired specification. While the installer can be used by itself, it may take some users more time to fully understand it’s capabilities. This quickstart solution wraps around the installer and provides a simple way to create an installer-provisioned infrastructure (IPI) cluster with a few clicks.
An OpenShift cluster generally consists of 3 control plane nodes and 3 compute nodes. Workloads are load balanced using the IBM Cloud Load Balancer offering and private DNS is configured using the IBM Cloud DNS offering. Because these clusters are installer provisioned infrastructure (IPI) clusters, they come with the OpenShift Machine API out of the box. This allows for scaling your cluster up or down with a single command or through event driven automation.
Currently this offering requires you to bring your own license. You can obtain your pull-secret by logging into your Red Hat account at https://console.redhat.com/openshift/install/pull-secret. You can even use a trial license and upgrade after deployment.
This Quickstart offering is available today, and more improvements to it are planned for future versions to make deployment even easier.