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
  • Must be in Dynamic Partition Manager (DPM) mode in order to use the playbook that automates the creation of the KVM host.
    • 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 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

FTP Server#

  • On the same network as your IBM zSystems / LinuxONE hardware.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 for s390x architecture mounted in an accessible folder (e.g. /home/ftpuser/rhel/)
    • If you do not yet have RHEL for s390x, 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.
  • A folder to store config files (e.g. /home/ftpuser/ocp-config)
  • A user with sudo and SSH access.

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:
brew install python3 #MacOS

sudo dnf install python3 #Fedora

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. Use this template to install them via the terminal:
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:
pip3 install zhmcclient cryptography packaging PyYAML

ansible-galaxy collection install ibm.ibm_zhmc
  • If you are using MacOS, you also need to have Homebrew package manager installed:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

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