78 Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Power Systems: Volume 1
The OpenShift architecture builds on top of Kubernetes and consists of three types of roles 
for the nodes:
/SM590000Master: These nodes are Kubernetes Master Nodes that can provide more functions, such 
as the web console with the self-service portal, and the developers and 
operations-focused dashboards.
/SM590000Infrastructure: These nodes are Kubernetes Worker Nodes that are dedicated to host 
functions, such as the OpenShift Routes and the OpenShift internal registry.
/SM590000Worker: These nodes are the Kubernetes Worker Nodes that are used to run the 
microservices and containerized applications that are deployed on OpenShift.
Master and Infrastructure roles can run on the same node.
Nodes can run on top of PowerVC, PowerVM, Red Hat Virtualization, KVM, or run bare metal 
environment. Table 5-6 lists the IBM Power Systems Infrastructure Landscape for OpenShift 
Container Platform 3.11.
Table 5-6   IBM Power Systems Infrastructure Landscape for OpenShift 3.11 
Important: Because of the consensus that is required by the RAFT algorithm, the etcd 
service must be deployed in odd numbers to maintain quorum. For this reason, the 
minimum number of etcd instances for production environments is three.
IaaS PowerVC N/A RHV-M N/A
Hypervisor PowerVM PowerVM KVM/RHV Bare-Metal
Guest operating 
system
Red Hat 7.6 or 
later
Red Hat 7.6 or 
later
Red Hat 7.6 or 
later
Red Hat 7.6 or 
later
Systems E980, E950, 
S924, S922, 
S914, L922
E980, E950, 
S924, S922, 
S914, L922
LC922, AC922 LC922, AC922
Storage SAN, Software 
Defined Storage
NAS, Software 
Defined Storage 
NAS, Software 
Defined Storage
NAS, Software 
Defined Storage
Storage attach FVD: PowerVC, 
NFS, 
GlusterFS, 
FVD: Spectrum 
Scale
NFS, 
GlusterFS,
FVD: Spectrum 
Scale
NFS, 
GlusterFS,
FVD: Spectrum 
Scale
NFS, 
GlusterFS,
FVD: Spectrum 
Scale
Note: In this IBM Redbooks publication, we cover only the deployment of the OpenShift 
Container Platform 3.11 on top of PowerVC 1.4.3.1 environment.