Automate and scale Red Hat OpenShift deployment with HPE Synergy

[TechExperts]

Are you considering deploying OpenShift and want automated deployment? Are you interested in enterprise-grade persistent storage? Do you want to optimally deploy infrastructure, and simplify infrastructure manageability? Learn about HPE solutions for deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on HPE Synergy with HPE 3PAR or HPE Nimble Storage.

Container technology is rapidly changing the way organizations develop, deploy, and manage applications. Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform provides a reliable platform for deploying and scaling container-based applications.

You may find it neccessary to address some challenges when deploying infrastructure and applications in a mission-critical environment involving Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, such as:

• Overprovisioned infrastructure and provisioning time—To meet long-term needs, the current infrastructure is often overprovisioned, adding to CapEx and OpEx.
• Infrastructure Management complexity—The management of infrastructure components needs multiple tools, increasing complexity.

HPE Reference Configurations for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on HPE Synergy address these challenges and provide solutions around infrastructure provisioning, manageability, and scalability.

HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure enables optimized infrastructure deployment and simplifies manageability using HPE OneView. Simplified installation is a result when used in conjunction with Red Hat Ansible Tower. This accelerates Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployment and simplifies updates. HPE 3PAR or HPE Nimble Storage provide enterprise grade persistent storage providing necessary data management, High Availability and storage efficiency.

Here are solution highlights.

• HPE Synergy Composer and HPE Synergy Image Streamer are used to create deployment plans for rapid deployment of bare metal Red Hat OpenShift infrastructure. The fluid resource pools and software-defined intelligence of HPE Synergy allow administrators to rapidly compose any configuration required, reducing deployment time from hours or days down to minutes. The solution deploys Red Hat OpenShift 3.10 as a combination of virtual and physical resources. The OpenShift master, etcd, and load balancers are deployed as virtual machines running on three HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Compute Modules running Red Hat Virtualization Host 4.2 (RHVH) and managed by Red Hat Virtualization Manager (RHV-M). Infrastructure nodes are deployed as either virtual machines or as a component of bare metal Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes. Worker nodes are deployed on bare metal on six HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 Compute Modules running Red Hat Enterprise Linux or may be configured as virtual machines.
• For ephemeral and persistent container volumes, customers can choose from either fibre channel attached HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage or iSCSI based HPE Nimble storage.
• By utilizing HPE Synergy, the non-storage networks within the solution are able to traverse the Synergy infrastructure in an east-west fashion across high speed, low latency links both within and between HPE Virtual Connect Modules. In particular, communication between the core OpenShift management pieces remains within the HPE Synergy Frames.

The HPE Converged Architecture 750 (CA750) was used as the reference platform for the Red Hat OpenShift deployment. You can also customize your OpenShift configuration based on workload needs leveraging parts of the CA750 design. The CA750 approach provides pre-integrated, modular, and scalable converged systems that reduce deployment risk.

The reference configurations in conjunction with deployment guides provide instructions for creating golden images for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployment, operating system build plan, and operating system deployment plan. These utilize the plan scripts for using Image Streamer to deploy Red Hat Open Shift 3.10. The reference configurations also show how to deploy Red Hat OpenShift at scale with built-in automation.

Now infrastructure provisioning, manageability, and scalability requirements are met.

HPE Reference Configurations for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on HPE Synergy with HPE 3PAR or HPE Nimble Storage address these three key requirements: infrastructure provisioning, manageability, and scalability.

You can access deployment guides here:

• Deployment guide and accompanying Ansible deployment scripts for HPE 3PAR
• Deployment guide and accompanying Ansible deployment scripts for HPE Nimble Storage

Please contact your HPE representative for additional details.

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Meet Infrastructure Insights blogger Mandar Chitale, HPE Solution Engineering Team. Mandar has two decades of experience in the IT industry. Currently, he is a Program Manager with the HPE Solution Engineering Team which is focused on creating Solution Reference Architectures for enterprise use cases based on the traditional and emerging digital technology scape.

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