Prerequisites#

Red Hat#

  • Account (Sign Up)
  • License or free trial of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for IBM Z systems - s390x architecture (comes with the required licenses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CoreOS)

IBM zSystems#

  • Hardware Management Console (HMC) access on IBM zSystems or LinuxONE
  • In order to use the playbook that automates the creation of the KVM host Dynamic Partition Manager (DPM) mode is required.
    • If DPM mode is not an option for your environment, that playbook can be skipped, but a bare-metal RHEL server must be set-up on an LPAR manually (Filipe Miranda's how-to article) before moving on. Once that is done, continue with the playbook 3 that sets up the KVM host.
  • For a minimum installation, at least:
    • 6 Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs) with SMT2 enabled
    • 85 GB of RAM
    • An FCP storage group created with 1 TB of disk space
    • 8 IPv4 addresses

File Server#

  • A file server accessible from your IBM zSystems / LinuxONE server.
  • Either FTP or HTTP service configured and active.
  • Once a RHEL server is installed natively on the LPAR, pre-existing or configured by this automation, (i.e. the KVM host), you can use that as the file server.
  • If you are not using a pre-existing KVM host(s) and need to create them using this automation, you must use an FTP server because the HMC does not support HTTP.
  • A user with sudo and SSH access on that server.
  • A DVD ISO file of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 for s390x architecture mounted in an accessible folder (e.g. /home//rhel/ for FTP or /var/www/html/rhel for HTTP)
    • If you do not have RHEL for s390x yet, go to the Red Hat Customer Portal and download it.
    • Under 'Product Variant' use the drop-down menu to select 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems'
    • Double-check it's for version 8 and for s390x architecture
    • Then scroll down to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x Binary DVD and click on the 'Download Now' button.
    • To pull the image directly from the command-line of your file server, copy the link for the 'Download Now' button and use wget to pull it down. wget "https://access.cdn.redhat.com/content/origin/files/sha256/13/13[...]40/rhel-8.7-s390x-dvd.iso?user=6[...]e"
    • Don't forget to mount it too:
      • FTP: mount <rhel-8.7-s390x-dvd.iso> /home/<user>/rhel
      • or HTTP: mount <rhel-8.7-s390x-dvd.iso> /var/www/html/rhel
  • A folder created to store config files (e.g. /home/user/ocp-config for FTP or /var/www/html/ocp-config for http)
    • For FTP: sudo mkdir /home/<username>/ocp-config
    • or HTTP: sudo mkdir /var/www/html/ocp-config

Ansible Controller#

  • The computer/virtual machine running Ansible, sometimes referred to as localhost.
  • Must be running on with MacOS or Linux operating systems.
  • Network access to your IBM zSystems / LinuxONE hardware
  • All you need to run Ansible is a terminal and a text editor. However, an IDE like VS Code is highly recommended for an integrated, user-friendly experience with helpful extensions like YAML.
  • Python3 installed:
    • MacOS, first install Homebrew package manager: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" then install Python3 brew install python3 #MacOS
    • Fedora: sudo dnf install python3 #Fedora
    • Debian: sudo apt install python3 #Debian
  • Once Python3 is installed, you also need Ansible version 2.9 or above:
pip3 install ansible
  • Once Ansible is installed, you will need a few collections from Ansible Galaxy:
ansible-galaxy collection install community.general community.crypto ansible.posix community.libvirt
  • If you will be using these playbooks to automate the creation of the LPAR(s) that will act as KVM host(s) for the cluster, you will also need:
ansible-galaxy collection install ibm.ibm_zhmc
  • If you are using MacOS, you also need to have Xcode:
xcode-select --install

Jumphost for NAT network#

  • If for KVM network NAT is used, instead of macvtap, a ssh tunnel using a jumphost is required to access the OCP cluster. To configure the ssh tunnel expect is required on the jumphost. Expect will be installed during the setup of the bastion (4_setup_bastion.yaml playbook). In case of missing access to install additional packages, install it manually on the jumphost by executing following command:
yum install expect

In addition make sure that python3 is installed on the jumphost otherwise ansible might fail to run the tasks. You can install python3 manually by executing the following command:

yum install python3