Introduction

The OpenShift Container Platform installer includes the Ansible role openshift-management and playbooks for deploying Red Hat CloudForms 4.6 (CloudForms Management Engine 5.9, or CFME) on OpenShift Container Platform.

The current implementation is incompatible with the Technology Preview deployment process of Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 as described in OpenShift Container Platform 3.6 documentation.

When deploying Red Hat CloudForms on OpenShift Container Platform, there are two major decisions to make:

  1. Do you want an external or a containerized (also referred to as podified) PostgreSQL database?

  2. Which storage class will back your persistent volumes (PVs)?

For the first decision, you can deploy Red Hat CloudForms in one of two ways, depending on the location of the PostgreSQL database to be used by Red Hat CloudForms:

Deployment Variant Description

Fully containerized

All application services and the PostgreSQL database are run as pods on OpenShift Container Platform.

External database

The application utilizes an externally-hosted PostgreSQL database server, while all other services are ran as pods on OpenShift Container Platform.

For the second decision, the openshift-management role provides customization options for overriding many default deployment parameters. This includes the following storage class options to back your PVs:

Storage Class Description

NFS (default)

Local, on cluster

NFS External

NFS somewhere else, like a storage appliance

Cloud Provider

Use automatic storage provisioning from your cloud provider (GCE or AWS)

Preconfigured (advanced)

Assumes you created everything ahead of time

Topics in this guide include the requirements for running Red Hat CloudForms on OpenShift Container Platform, descriptions of the available configuration variables, and instructions on running the installer either during your initial OpenShift Container Platform installation or after your cluster has been provisioned.