Option 2: Preparing your cluster for an air-gapped (offline) deployment
Before you begin
The following progress bar shows you where you are in the installation process. You can click the completed parts in the diagram to go back and check that you did everything that you needed to do.
About this task
The IBM Catalog Management Plug-in or ibm-pak for short, uses standard
tooling for registry and cluster access. A CASE (Container Application Software for Enterprise)
package specifies the composition of the product and the images that must be copied into an
air-gapped environment.
The following diagram shows the steps that are involved in installing with an air-gap environment on OCP.
It is common in production to have a cluster that cannot access the internet. In these cases, you can still install Cloud Pak for Business Automation and OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) in an air-gapped (otherwise known as offline or disconnected) environment. An air-gapped installation uses the IBM operator catalog to mimic a typical online installation except that the Cloud Pak images are in your own registry. You can use a bastion host or a compute device (like a laptop), with or without portable storage (like an external hard disk drive) to transfer the images to an air-gapped network.
All of these scenarios use Container Application Software for Enterprises (CASE) files to mirror content from a source to a target. CASE is a specification that defines metadata and structure for packaging, managing, and unpacking containerized applications.
The following diagram provides an overview of the air-gapped installation options.
When you install Cloud Pak for Business Automation then Cloud Pak foundational services is also installed. If no other Cloud Paks are installed on the cluster, then Cloud Pak for Business Automation installs the foundational services in a namespace-scoped instance in the same namespace as Cloud Pak for Business Automation. If another Cloud Pak is installed before Cloud Pak for Business Automation, then foundational services can be shared between the Cloud Pak deployments.
If you want to install Cloud Pak for Business Automation in "All Namespaces", then you must also make sure that the foundational services (installed by Cloud Pak for Business Automation or another Cloud Pak) are also installed in "All Namespaces".
If you use multiple LDAPs with the Identity Management (IM) service, you must make sure that the usernames are unique across them. Your Cloud Pak for Business Automation deployments can either use the same LDAP or make sure that your users are unique. For more information, see Configuring LDAP connection.
What to do next
Use the following steps to prepare your air-gapped installation. Follow the steps in order and use the What to do next sections to help you move to the next step.