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Understanding Satellite location and hosts

Understanding Satellite location and hosts

An IBM Cloud Satellite® location is a representation of an environment in your infrastructure provider, such as an on-prem data center or cloud. Locations are made up of compute sources, called hosts, that resides in your infrastructure provider or even locally. After you attach your hosts to a Satellite location, assign the hosts to the location control plane or use them to power your service workloads.

Locations can be made of hosts of any size, including as small as a local desktop computer or as large as hundreds of computers in a central office. Because locations are made up of your infrastructure, you can create a Satellite location anywhere that your infrastructure is located.

Satellite location overview

To set up a Satellite location, you must first create the location, add hosts to it, and then create the location control plane. If you use a quick start template (Schematics template), some steps are done for you automatically.  

High level process overview.
High-level overview of a Satellite location

  1. Plan your environment for Satellite by choosing your infrastructure, thinking about the services that you want to use, and setting up the hosts that you want to use. Make sure your hosts meet the minimum requirement and that you consider the size of your location.

    Plan for your Satellite location.
    Planning for your Satellite location

  2. Create your location that runs on your host infrastructure. Choose an installation method for your location, based on what is available for your infrastructure provider.

    Create your location.
    Creating your Satellite location

  3. Attach hosts to your location by running the installation scripts (RHEL) or ingestion scripts (RHCOS). If you are using a Schematics template, this step is done for you. After your hosts are attached, they are in an unassigned state.

    Attach hosts to your location.
    Attaching hosts to your location

  4. Select hosts to make up your location control plane. The hosts in your Satellite location do not run any workloads until you assign them as compute capacity to the Satellite location control plane or a service. For example, a basic setup has 3 hosts that are assigned as worker nodes to the Satellite location control plane. For more information, see sizing your location. After you assign a host, it enters a provisioning status.

    Create your location control plane.
    Creating your location control plane

  5. Wait for the host to enter a normal state. When you assign a host to the control plane, the host is bootstrapped to become a worker node in your Satellite location control plan. This bootstrap process consists of three phases, and all phases must complete. First, required images are downloaded to the host from IBM Cloud Container Registry. Then, the host is rebooted to apply the configuration. Finally, software packages are set up on the host. After the host is successfully bootstrapped, it enters a normal health state with an assigned status. You can no longer log in to the underlying machine with SSH to troubleshoot any issues. Instead, see Debugging host health.

    Satellite Location in a normal state.
    Satellite Location in a normal state

  6. After you set up your Satellite location control plane, you can assign hosts to Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service such as clusters or databases.

    Assigning hosts to your services.
    Assigning hosts to your Satellite-enabled services

I created a Satellite location, what comes next?

Now that your Satellite location is set up, you are ready to start using IBM Cloud services.

  1. Add compute capacity to your location by attaching more hosts to the location so that you can run Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service.
  2. Create a Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud service, such as a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. You assign the additional hosts that you previously attached as worker nodes to provide the compute power for the 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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