Chapter 5. Red Hat OpenShift installation planning and considerations 79
5.3  Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 on IBM 
PowerVC
In this section, we provide guidelines and considerations for deploying and managing Red 
Hat OpenShift Container Platform on IBM Power Virtualization Center (PowerVC).
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that provides 
developers and IT organizations with a cloud application platform for deploying new 
applications on secure, scalable resources with minimal configuration and management 
overhead. It allows developers to create and deploy applications by delivering a consistent 
environment for both development and during the runtime lifecycle that requires no server 
management.
IBM PowerVC uses OpenStack technology to provide enterprise virtualization and cloud 
management for IBM Power Systems, which provides all of the necessary capabilities for a 
fully featured Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private cloud solution.
5.3.1  Reference architecture summary
The deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on PowerVC varies among several 
factors that affect the installation process. Consider the following questions:
/SM590000How many instances do you minimally require in the cluster?
/SM590000How to configure the PowerVC Host Groups and colocation rules?
/SM590000Is High Availability required?
/SM590000What installation tools will you use?
/SM590000Which storage and network backends will you use?
For this reference architecture, eight instances (VMs) were defined: six for the OpenShift 
cluster, one for the Load Balancer, and one for the Deployment Host. We tested on Single or 
Dual Host Groups (Availability Zones) and soft-anti-affinity rules for OpenShift cluster 
instances (VMs). 
This reference architecture requires High Availability configuration (as described in “High 
Availability” on page 84) and uses Ansible and IBM Terraform for installation and prerequisite 
checks.
This reference architecture uses OpenShift ovs-multitenant on top of Shared Ethernet 
Adapter (SEA) for network and IBM PowerVC FlexVolume on top of Cinder for persistent 
storage.
Note: The minimum version for PowerVC is 1.4.3 Fix Pack 1. This version adds IBM 
PowerVC FlexVolume Driver support for OpenShift Container Platform 3.11.
Note: Terraform is not required to install OpenShift. Multiple approaches are available for 
deploying infrastructure. In this book, we demonstrate how to use an infrastructure as code 
with Terraform to simplify the deployment. The Terraform examples in this book are open 
source and “use-at-your-own-risk” templates.