Before you begin

The IBM Storage Ceph as a Service plug-in for vSphere is based on the VMware remote plug-in architecture and is distributed and deployed by using an Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) bundle.

Appliance requirements

The virtual machine appliance requires the following resources:

• 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of memory Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 or higher

Following are the networking (Ethernet, TCPIP) requirements:

• One IP address (IPv4)
• Static or DHCP Gateway DNS Netmask

Download the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) installation package. IBM® Fix Central

Deploy the appliance

1. From the vSphere Client, deploy the OVF template within a VMware cluster.

2. In the Select networks step, select a network that allows communication between vCenter and the management interfaces for IBM Storage Systems.

3. Power on the appliance after the OVA is successfully deployed.

   • By default, the appliance is configured with a firewall and therefore does not respond to ping (ICMP) requests.

   • Initial login has a default username as root and default password as IBMplugin. Users need to change the password after the initial login to continue.

Register the vSphere plug-in into vCenter.

1. Log in to the vSphere plug-in appliance as root.

2. Register the vSphere plug-in with the vCenter instance or instances.

   The registration command displays the thumbprint of the vSphere instance for verification.

   ibm-plugin register -u <vCenter Username> -v <IP_or_FQDN_of_vCenter>
   

   To link multiple linked-mode vCenters to a single plug-in appliance, register each vCenter independently.

3. Enter the vCenter password when prompted.

4. To complete the plug-in activation, refresh the vSphere Client browser.

Verify registration status

Check the plug-in status to see which vCenters are registered to the appliance.

ibm-plugin status

The ibm-plugin status command can be run at any time.

If the plug-in is not registered to any vCenter, the plug-in Registered output displays as False.

If you wish to unregister the plug-in, run the command

ibm-plugin unregister -u <vCenter Username> -v <IP_or_FQDN_of_vCenter>

Next Steps

After the installation, you need to get the following from your admin.

• Service ID with a manager role for IBM Storage Ceph as a Service
• API Key