Chapter 1. About the Assisted Installer
The Assisted Installer for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a user-friendly installation solution offered on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. The Assisted Installer supports various deployment platforms with a focus on bare metal, Nutanix, vSphere, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
You can install OpenShift Container Platform on premises in a connected environment, with an optional HTTP/S proxy, for the following platforms:
- Highly available OpenShift Container Platform or single-node OpenShift cluster
- OpenShift Container Platform on bare metal or vSphere with full platform integration, or other virtualization platforms without integration
- Optionally, OpenShift Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation
1.1. Features
The Assisted Installer provides installation functionality as a service. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach has the following features:
- Web interface
- You can install your cluster by using the Hybrid Cloud Console instead of creating installation configuration files manually.
- No bootstrap node
- You do not need a bootstrap node because the bootstrapping process runs on a node within the cluster.
- Streamlined installation workflow
- You do not need in-depth knowledge of OpenShift Container Platform to deploy a cluster. The Assisted Installer provides reasonable default configurations.
- You do not need to run the OpenShift Container Platform installer locally.
- You have access to the latest Assisted Installer for the latest tested z-stream releases.
- Advanced networking options
- The Assisted Installer supports IPv4 and dual stack networking with OVN only, NMState-based static IP addressing, and an HTTP/S proxy.
- OVN is the default Container Network Interface (CNI) for OpenShift Container Platform 4.12 and later.
- SDN is supported up to OpenShift Container Platform 4.14. SDN supports IPv4 only.
- Preinstallation validation
Before installing, the Assisted Installer checks the following configurations:
- Network connectivity
- Network bandwidth
- Connectivity to the registry
- Upstream DNS resolution of the domain name
- Time synchronization between cluster nodes
- Cluster node hardware
- Installation configuration parameters
- REST API
- You can automate the installation process by using the Assisted Installer REST API.
1.2. Customizing your installation
You can customize your installation by selecting one or more options.
These options are installed as Operators, which are used to package, deploy, and manage services and applications on the control plane.
You can deploy these Operators after the installation if you require advanced configuration options.
- OpenShift Virtualization
You can deploy OpenShift Virtualization to perform the following tasks:
- Create and manage Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs).
- Run pod and VM workloads alongside each other in a cluster.
- Connect to VMs through a variety of consoles and CLI tools.
- Import and clone existing VMs.
- Manage network interface controllers and storage disks attached to VMs.
- Live migrate VMs between nodes.
- Multicluster engine for Kubernetes
You can deploy the multicluster engine for Kubernetes to perform the following tasks in a large, multi-cluster environment:
- Provision and manage additional Kubernetes clusters from your initial cluster.
- Use hosted control planes to reduce management costs and optimize cluster deployment by decoupling the control and data planes.
Use GitOps Zero Touch Provisioning to manage remote edge sites at scale.
You can deploy the multicluster engine with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation on all OpenShift Container Platform clusters.
ImportantDeploying multicluster engine without OpenShift Data Foundation results in the following scenarios:
- Multi-node cluster: No storage is configured. You must configure storage after the installation process.
- Single-node OpenShift: LVM Storage is installed.
You must review the prerequisites to ensure that your environment has sufficient additional resources for the multicluster engine.
- Logical Volume Manager Storage
- You can use Logical Volume Manager Storage (LVM Storage) to dynamically provision block storage on a limited resources cluster.
- Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation
- You can use Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation for file, block, and object storage. This storage option is recommended for all OpenShift Container Platform clusters. OpenShift Data Foundation requires a separate subscription.
Additional resources
- Operators.
- OpenShift Virtualization product overview.
- OpenShift Virtualization documentation.
- "About the multicluster engine for Kubernetes Operator" in Architecture.
- "Introduction to hosted control planes" in Architecture.
- Edge computing.
- "Persistent storage using Logical Volume Manager Storage" in Storage.
- OpenShift Data Foundation datasheet.
- OpenShift Data Foundation documentation.
1.3. API support policy
Assisted Installer APIs are supported for a minimum of three months from the announcement of deprecation.
