Chapter 5. Red Hat OpenShift installation planning and considerations 99
The relationship between PowerVC and OpenShift is complementary. Consider the following 
points:
/SM590000PowerVC exposes resources that OpenShift uses.
/SM590000OpenShift runs its containerized applications on the infrastructure that is provisioned by 
PowerVC.
Table 5-7 lists the minimum resources that are required for OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 
virtual machines. eCPU refers to the number of processing units of entitled capacity.
Table 5-7   OpenShift nodes roles and configurations
The architecture consists of the following components:
/SM590000PowerVC: Provides Infrastructure as a Service and manages:
– IBM Power Systems (PowerVM): 
 2 x Virtual I/O Servers: 2 cores that are configured in dedicated donated mode and 
16 GB memory
 2 x Ethernet cards
 2 x Fibre Channel cards for each VIO Server
– Dual SAN Fabrics Brocade or Cisco
– Storage backends
/SM590000Deployment host: RHEL 7.6 for POWER8 and RHEL-ALT 7.6 for POWER9 minimum 
installation. Responsible for deploying one or more OpenShift Container Platform 
environments:
– Terraform for deploying PowerVC infrastructure (network, storage, virtual machines)
– OpenShift-Ansible for deploying OpenShift Container Platform
/SM590000Load balancer: RHEL 7.6 for POWER8 and RHEL-ALT 7.6 for POWER9 minimum 
installation. HAproxy offers a single entry point for the many Red Hat OpenShift Container 
Platform components.
/SM590000Master-Infrastructure: RHEL 7.6 for POWER8 and RHEL-ALT 7.6 for POWER9 minimum 
installation. Responsible for running the OpenShift master and infrastructure components, 
including the API server, controller manager server, etcd, registry, and routers. 
/SM590000Worker: RHEL 7.6 for POWER8 and RHEL-ALT 7.6 for POWER9 minimum installation. 
Responsible for running Application containers that are created by the users of the 
OpenShift service.
Role Count vCPU eCPU Memory (GB) rootvg (GB) dockervg (GB)
Deployment 1 2 0.4 8 64 N/A
Load Balancer 1 2 0.4 8 64 N/A
Master-Infra 3 8 1.6 32 64 128
Worker 3 4 0.8 16 64 128
Note: The HAProxy Load Balancer is intended to demonstrate the API server’s HA 
mode and is not recommended for production environments. If you are deploying to a 
cloud provider, Red Hat recommends deploying a cloud-native TCP-based Load 
Balancer or take other steps to provide a highly available Load Balancer.