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Attaching on-prem hosts to your location

Attaching on-prem hosts to your location

After you create the location in IBM Cloud Satellite®, add compute capacity to your location so that you can set up Red Hat OpenShift clusters or interact with other Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud services.

To attach Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) hosts, your location must be enabled for Red Hat CoreOS. For more information, see Is my location enabled for Red Hat CoreOS?. Note that you can still attach Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts to a location that is enabled for Red Hat CoreOS.

Before you begin, make sure that you create host machines that meet the minimum hardware requirements in your on-prem data center, in IBM Cloud, or in public cloud providers.

After you attach a host to your location, Satellite disables the ability to log in to the host as root with SSH for security purposes. You might see error messages if you try to SSH as root into a host that is attached successfully to a location. To restore the ability to SSH into the machine, you can remove the host and reload the operating system.

Not sure how many hosts to attach to your location? See Sizing your Satellite location.

Attaching on-premises RHEL hosts to your location

To attach RHEL hosts that reside in your on-premises data center to your location, follow these general steps to run the host attachment script.

  1. Download the host script for your location. To attach a host with a RHEL operating system, the attachment script is a Shell script.

  2. Retrieve the public IP address of your host, or if your host has only a private network interface, the private IP address of your host.

  3. Copy the script from your local machine to your host.

    scp -i <filepath_to_key_file> <filepath_to_script> <username>@<IP_address>:/tmp/attach.sh

  4. Log in to your host.

    ssh -i <filepath_to_key_file> <username>@<IP_address>

  5. Update your host to have the required RHEL packages. For more information about how to install these package, see the Red Hat documentation.

  6. Run the script.

    sudo nohup bash /tmp/attach.sh &

  7. Check the progress of the registration script.

    journalctl -f -u ibm-host-attach

  8. As you run the scripts on each machine, check that your hosts are shown in the Hosts tab of your location dashboard. This process might take a few minutes to complete. All hosts show a Health status of Ready when a heartbeat for the machine can be detected, and a Status of Unassigned as the hosts are not yet assigned to your Satellite control plane or a Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

  9. After you have attached your hosts, assign them to the Satellite control plane or use them to create a Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster.

If your host is not attaching to your location, you can log in to the host to debug it. For more information, see Logging in to a RHEL host machine to debug.

After you attach a host to your location, Satellite disables the ability to log in to the host as root with SSH for security purposes. You might see error messages if you try to SSH as root into a host that is attached successfully to a location. To restore the ability to SSH into the machine, you can remove the host and reload the operating system.

Attaching on-premises Red Hat CoreOS hosts to your location

To attach Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) hosts that reside in your on-premises data center to your location, follow these general steps to run the host attachment script.

  1. Download the host script for your location. To attach a host with a Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) operating system, the attachment script is a Red Hat CoreOS ignition (.ign) file.
  2. Boot your RHCOS host and include the file path to the ignition script as the --user-data. This command varies, depending on the type of host that you are adding. For example, if your hosts are Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosts, then you add --user-data file:///tmp/attach_hypershift.ign to your launch template. Consult your provider documentation for more information about how to boot your host and include a file path to the ignition script.
  3. As you run the scripts on each machine, check that your hosts are shown in the Hosts tab of your location dashboard. This process might take a few minutes to complete. All hosts show a Health status of Ready when a heartbeat for the machine can be detected, and a Status of Unassigned as the hosts are not yet assigned to your Satellite control plane or a Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
  4. Assign your hosts to the Satellite control plane or a Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster.

If your host is not attaching to your location, you can log in to the host to debug it. For more information, see Logging in to a RHCOS host machine to debug.

After you attach a host to your location, Satellite disables the ability to log in to the host as root with SSH for security purposes. You might see error messages if you try to SSH as root into a host that is attached successfully to a location. To restore the ability to SSH into the machine, you can remove the host and reload the operating system.

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.

  1. Assign hosts to the location control plane or to your IBM Cloud services.
  2. 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.
  3. Manage your applications with Satellite Config.
  4. Create Satellite cluster storage templates.
  5. Learn more about the Satellite Link component and how you can use endpoints to manage the network traffic between your location and IBM Cloud.

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