Authors: Yonatan Golick and Ilana Polonsky
Introduction
As part of the OpenInfraLabs initiative of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, Red Hat and the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) are engaged in many innovative research and engineering collaborations. Rubicone, a Red Hat business solution provider partner in Israel, recently joined an open source engineering project to evaluate and integrate IBM’s POWER9™ servers with the MOC, using Red Hat OpenShift in a live datacenter environment with active users, operators and engineers. The Rubicone team collaborated with engineers in Massachusetts and TelAviv on this project, bringing their expertise in open source development, advanced integration methodology, and innovative spirit to the effort. Red Hat provided OpenShift expertise, and Mass Open Cloud engineers and operators shared their detailed knowledge of their data center and user requirements. This successful project showed the ability of teams from various backgrounds and locations to collaborate and work openly, sharing results with the broader research and engineering community.
The Challenges
- Access to the environment for the POWER9 project is provided through a server that mediates between the system and the Internet. This server has two different network interfaces. One faces the disconnected network and the other faces the Internet.
- The POWER9 server has a ppc64le architecture, which differs from the usual architecture used for running OpenShift.
- Unlike the default OpenShift installation, which has a three-node installation with a fourth provisioning node, this environment has only three nodes: a Bastion Server, a Bootstrap Server and an All-In-One Server that contains all of the OpenShift components.
The Accomplishments
- Created the design and architecture for the POWER9 installation in this environment
- Configured the networking for the different components to match the architecture design
- Installed & configured a DNS server to orchestrate the whole system
- Built a private registry for OpenShift in a disconnected environment
- Installed the RHEL 8 operating system on the Bastion server.
- Updated the firmware for all of the components associated with the system
- Provisioned Red Hat CoreOS on the nodes with the appropriate configurations
- Deployed OpenShift 4.6 using OpenShift Installer
The Community
This project is managed in the open source community. We created a GitHub repository for task management and documented every step and every decision made in Git issues. We also managed a daily journal for our progress to help transfer knowledge to everyone who wants to follow or contribute. In this project, Rubicone collaborated with Red Hat’s consulting team in Israel and the Mass Open Cloud team at Boston University, working together to make a bigger contribution to the open source community.
This working method can help others in the open-source community with similar interests. Rubicone contributes to open source to amplify lessons learned and expand the knowledge base with each project worked on. Rubicone, Red Hat, and the MOC would like to build a strong community around this work, and we invite everyone to contribute, inspect, and share our project.
