Attaching Alibaba Cloud hosts

You can add hosts from Alibaba Cloud to Satellite.

All hosts that you want to add must meet the host requirements, such as the RHEL 8 packages and networking setup. For more information, see Host requirements.

Before you begin, create a Satellite location. Note that your location displays Action required until you add hosts and create the control plane.

To add hosts from Alibaba cloud, follow these general steps.

Download the host script.
Set up your virtual machines in Alibaba Cloud.
1. Log in to your Alibaba account.
2. From the VPC console, create or select an existing Virtual Private Cloud. When you create a VPC, you must create a vSwitch in each zone where you want to add hosts.
3. Select the Resources tab.
4. Verify that you have a Route table and at least one vSwitch.
5. Create a security group by clicking add from the Security groups section. For more information about the values to set, see Security group settings.
6. From the Elastic Computing Service (ECS) console, create a minimum of 3 instances that meet the Satellite host requirements.
7. Install a supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux version.
Connect to your instances and install any required packages.
Upload and run the host attach script on each instances. After the host script completes, your hosts are available in the Hosts tab of your Satellite console. All hosts show a Status of Ready when a connection to the machine can be established. Note that the hosts show a Status of Unassigned as the hosts are not yet assigned.
1. Upload the host script file to your Alibaba instance.
```
scp -i <PEM-FILE> <Path2HostScript> cloud-user@<PUBLIC_IP>:/tmp/attach.sh
```
2. Log in to your instance.
```
ssh -i <path-to-pemfile> cloud-user@<PUBLIC_IP>
```
3. Run the host script file. For example,
```
sudo nohup bash /tmp/attach.sh &
```
4. Review the status of the registration script.
```
journalctl -f -u ibm-host-attach
```
Assign your hosts to either the control plane or a worker pool.

Security group settings

As described in the host networking requirements, your Alibaba hosts must have access to connect to IBM Cloud Satellite. If you use hosts in a virtual private cloud (VPC), you can create a security group similar to the following example. You can get the owner, group, user, and VPC IDs from your Alibaba provider resources.

Example security group for Alibaba
Action	Priority	Protocol Type	Port Range	Authorization Object
Allow	1	Custom TCP	Destination `30000/32767`	Source `0.0.0.0/0`
Allow	1	Custom TCP	Destination `443/443`	Source `0.0.0.0/0`

In addition to these inbound rules, you must allow all outbound connectivity to all ports and IP addresses.

For more information, see Security groups in the Alibaba documentation.

I added hosts to my location, what's next?

Now that you added hosts to your location, you can assign them to your location control plane or to your IBM Cloud services.

Assign hosts to the location control plane or to your IBM Cloud services.
Create a Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service, such as a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. You can even register existing Red Hat OpenShift clusters to your location to use as deployment targets.
Manage your applications with Satellite Config.
Create Satellite cluster storage templates.
Learn more about the Satellite Link component and how you can use endpoints to manage the network traffic between your location and IBM Cloud.

Need help? Check out Getting support where you can find information about cloud status, issues, and logging; contacting support; and setting your email notification preferences for IBM Cloud platform-related items.