Satellite for resellers

As a hybrid or distributed cloud reseller, I want to set up Satellite locations and deploy Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud clusters for my customers.

Account overview

In this model, you create an enterprise account and separate client accounts for each client. Within each client account, you create a Satellite location and deploy an Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster.

Concept overview of Satellite tenancy setup — Enterprise account setup for resellers.

Managing client locations and clusters

Review the best practices for managing client locations and clusters.

Understand the client's requirements and use case.: Gather requirements for your client's use case before creating their location and cluster. Understand the types of workloads your clients want to run in their location and the compute, storage, and other requirements that go along with their use case.
Keep extra hosts available and unassigned in the location: For faster scale up, plan to keep extra hosts available and ready for assignment to clusters and services in the location.

Understanding responsibilities for your enterprise and your clients

Create a responsibility matrix for your enterprise and your clients. The following example shows a responsibility matrix that you can adapt for your purposes.

Example responsibility matrix for resellers.
Your enterprise	Client cluster administrator	Client cluster operator	Client developer
Prepare requirements template & review client requirements. Prepare quote. Create client accounts, locations, and clusters, and API keys.	Perform requirements assessment. Complete the requirements template. Review and approve quote. Review and confirm environment setup. Assign cluster operator and developer roles.	Verify cluster operator permissions	Verify cluster developer permissions

Setting up your account

Before you can resell Satellite, set up an IBM Cloud enterprise and client accounts.

Creating an enterprise account

Create an enterprise account for your organization. This account serves as the parent account. After you create the enterprise account, you can set up client accounts for each customer.

Setting up client accounts

Complete the following steps to set up a client account with a resource group, location, logging and monitoring instances, and a Satellite location.

Want to automate this step? After you create an account, you can use the IBM terraform provider plug-in to provision IBM Cloud service instances.

Add a client account to your enterprise.
In the client account, provision an Log Analysis instance.
In the client account, provision a Monitoring instance.
In the client account, provision an IBM Cloud Object Storage instance.

Repeat the steps for creating a client account for each client that you add to your enterprise. Then, continue the following steps to setting up the location and cluster.

Setting up the client location

After setting up your enterprise account and creating at least one client account, gather Satellite location requirements and create a location for your customer.

Sizing and creating the client location

Gather your client's requirements and decide the location size, host flavors, and storage. Also, decide the number of control plane hosts and the number of hosts that they need for services such as clusters. For help with location planning, see Understanding Satellite locations and Planning your environment for Satellite.
Provision virtual machines or decide your on-premises hosts that you want to use in your location. Make sure that your hosts meet the requirements for the following:

Before you begin:

Find out more about locations and hosts.
Plan your infrastructure.
Verify your host setup.
Make sure that you have the correct permissions to create locations. For more information, see Checking user permissions.
Satellite uses Object Storage to store data about your location and backups for your location's clusters. You can choose to have a bucket created automatically when you create your location or specify an existing bucket. If you want to use an existing bucket, it must have cross-regional resiliency.

To create a location, open the Satellite console and select Create location.

Getting started options

The following options determine your installation process.

If your infrastructure is on prem or edge, select the On prem and Edge option. With this option, you create a location, choose your zones, and download a host attach script to run on your hosts.

If your infrastructure is a cloud provider and you want to use only hosts that are running RHEL, select the cloud provider that you want to use, enter your credentials, and create your location. You can also download the terraform template and edit it before you run it.

If your infrastructure is a cloud provider and you want to use hosts that are running RHCOS or want to have more control over your host creation, then select Advanced configuration. With this option, you create a location, choose your zones, include your cloud provider credentials, and then download a host attach script (RHEL) or an ignition script (RHCOS) to run on your hosts.

If you selected On prem and Edge, you can change your location options by clicking Edit.

Satellite location options

The following options define your location.

Name: The Satellite location name must start with a letter, can contain letters, numbers, periods (.), and hyphen (-), and must be 35 characters or fewer. Do not reuse the same name for multiple locations, even if you deleted another location with the same name.

Resource group: Resource groups organize your account resources in customizable groupings so that you can quickly assign users access to more than one resource at a time. This value is set to default by default.

Physical address: For on-premises Locations, add a physical address to help associate your on-premises resources with your Satellite Location.

Description and Tags: Descriptions and tags help you organize your IBM Cloud resources.

Managed from: The IBM Cloud region that you want to use to manage your location. For more information about why you must select an IBM Cloud region, see About IBM Cloud regions for Satellite. Make sure to select the region that is closest to where your host machines physically reside that you plan to attach to your Satellite location to ensure low network latency between your Satellite location and IBM Cloud.

Zones: The names of the zones must match exactly the names of the corresponding zones in your infrastructure provider where you plan to create hosts, such as a cloud provider zone or on-prem rack. To retrieve the name of the zone for other cloud providers, consult your infrastructure provider.
- Alibaba regions and zones, such as us-east-1a and us-east-1b.
- AWS regions and zones, such as us-east-1a, us-east-1b, and us-east-1c.
- Azure topology.kubernetes.io/zone labels, such as eastus-1, eastus-2, and eastus-3. Don't use only the location name (eastus) or the zone number (1).
- GCP regions and zones, such as us-west1-a, us-west1-b, and us-west1-c.

Red Hat CoreOS Support: Satellite supports hosts that are running either RHEL or RHCOS. For more information, see Planning your operating system.

Object Storage: The exact name of an existing IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket that you want to use to back up Satellite location control plane data. Otherwise, a new bucket is automatically created in an Object Storage instance in your account. Do not delete your Object Storage instance or this bucket. If the service instance or bucket is deleted, your Satellite location control plane data cannot be backed up.

After you click Create, you can attach hosts to your location and finish the setup of your Satellite location control plane. Note that the token in the attach script is an API key, which must be treated and protected as sensitive information.

The host attach script for your location expires one year from the creation date. To make sure that hosts in your location don't have authentication issues, download a new copy of the host attach script at least once per year and update any unassigned hosts. For more information, see Why do my unassigned hosts have an Unresponsive status?.

Want to verify if your location is enabled for Red Hat CoreOS? See Is my location enabled for Red Hat CoreOS?.

Attaching hosts to the location

After creating the location, follow the steps to attach the hosts to the location.

Assigning hosts to the control plane

After you have attached hosts to the location, assign hosts to the control plane.

Be sure to leave some hosts unassigned to use in services such as clusters.

Before you begin

Attach the required number of hosts to your location for your Satellite control plane. For more information about sizing requirements, see sizing your Satellite location. For cloud provider-specific configurations, see Cloud infrastructure providers.
Verify that your location is in an Action required state.

To attach hosts as worker nodes to the control plane,

From the Satellite Locations dashboard, select the location where you want to finish the setup of your control plane.
From the Hosts tab, select the hosts to assign as worker nodes to your control plane. All hosts must be in an Unassigned status.
From the actions menu of each host, click Assign host.
Select Control plane as your cluster.
Assign hosts in groups of 3 evenly to the control plane cluster. For high availability, make sure that your hosts correspond to physically separate zones in your infrastructure provider. For example, if your infrastructure provider has us-east-1a, us-east-1b, and us-east-1c, enter these names for your Satellite zones. Then, assign 2 hosts from us-east-1a in your infrastructure provider to us-east-1a in your Satellite control plane, and so on. When you assign the hosts to the control plane, IBM bootstraps your machine. This process might take a few minutes to complete. During the bootstrapping process, the Health of your machine changes from Ready to Provisioning.
From the Hosts tab, verify that your hosts are successfully assigned to the Satellite location control plane. The assignment is successful when an IP address is added to your host and the Health status changes to Normal.
Verify that your location status changed to Normal. You might see a location message about the location not having enough hosts until the bootstrapping process completes.

After your hosts are successfully assigned to the control plane, it takes another 20-30 minutes until IBM monitoring is properly set up for your location. In addition, a DNS record is created for your location and the IP addresses of your hosts are automatically registered and added to your DNS record to allow load balancing and health checking for your location. This process can take up to 30 minutes to complete. During this process, your location status continues to show an action required state, and you might see intermittent errors, such as Satellite is attempting to recover or Verify that the Satellite location has a DNS record for load balancing requests to the location control plane.

Verify that the IP addresses of all your hosts were registered and added to the DNS record of your location. Check that the cert status is created and that the records are populated with the subdomains.

ibmcloud sat location dns ls --location <location_ID_or_name>

Example output

Retrieving location subdomains...
OK
Hostname                                                                                              Records                                                                                               Health Monitor   SSL Cert Status   SSL Cert Secret Name                                          Secret Namespace   
ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c000.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud   169.62.196.20,169.62.196.23,169.62.196.30                                                             None             created           ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c000   default   
ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c001.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud   169.62.196.30                                                                                         None             created           ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c001   default   
ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c002.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud   169.62.196.20                                                                                         None             created           ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c002   default   
ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c003.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud   169.62.196.23                                                                                         None             created           ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c003   default   
ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-ce00.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud   ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-c000.us-east.satellite.appdomain.cloud        None             created           ne1d37313068166254bcb-edfc0a8ba65085c5081eced6816c5b9c-ce00   default

To continue to use the location for production workloads, repeat these steps to attach more hosts to the location control plane in multiples of 3, such as 6, 9, or 12 hosts. For more information, see Adding capacity to your Satellite location control plane.

Creating a cluster, API key, and cluster roles

After setting up the location and the control plane, create cluster and an API key.

Creating a Satellite cluster

From the Red Hat OpenShift clusters console, click Create.
In the Infrastructure section, select Satellite.
In the OCP entitlement section, specify an existing OCP entitlement for the worker nodes in this cluster by providing your Red Hat® account pull secret as a file or in raw JSON format. The cluster also uses this pull secret to download Red Hat OpenShift images from your own Red Hat account.
In the Location section, select the Satellite location where you want to create the cluster. Make sure that the location that you select is in a Normal state.
In the Operating System section, select the operating system of the hosts that you want to use in the default worker pool of your cluster. In locations that are Red Hat CoreOS enabled, you can use either your RHCOS or RHEL hosts. In RHCOS enabled locations, when you want to add worker pools to your cluster, you can use RHCOS or RHEL hosts. Make sure to attach hosts with the operating system that you want to use to your location before assigning them to a worker pool.
In the Worker pools section, configure the details for your default worker pool.
1. Select the Satellite zones that Satellite uses to evenly assign hosts across zones that represent zones in your underlying infrastructure provider. Generally, create your worker pool across 3 zones for high availability.
2. Request the vCPU, Memory (GB), and number of Worker nodes per zone that you want to create the worker pool with. Satellite can automatically assign available hosts to the worker pool to fulfill your request. Generally, select at least 1 worker node per zone for a total of 3 worker nodes in your cluster.
In the Satellite Config section, decide whether to enable cluster admin access for Satellite Config. If you don't grant Satellite Config access, you can't later use the Satellite Config functionality to view or deploy Kubernetes resources for your clusters.If you want to enable access later, you can create custom RBAC roles for Satellite Config.
For the Resource details, enter a Cluster name and any IBM Cloud tags that you want to associate with your cloud resource. The cluster name must start with a letter, can contain letters, numbers, and hyphen (-), and must be 35 characters or fewer.
Click Create. When you create the cluster, the cluster master is automatically created in your Satellite location control plane, and your worker pool is automatically assigned available hosts that match your worker node request.
Wait for the cluster to reach a Normal state.

If you don't have any available and matching hosts in your Satellite location, the cluster is still created but enters a Warning state. Attach hosts to your Satellite location so that hosts can be assigned as worker nodes to the worker pool. If the hosts are not automatically assigned, you can also manually assign Satellite hosts to your cluster. Ensure that hosts are assigned as worker nodes in each zone of your default worker pool.
From the Red Hat OpenShift clusters console, verify that your cluster reaches a Normal state.
Access your cluster to access the Red Hat OpenShift web console or to run oc and kubectl commands from the CLI. If you enabled Satellite Config access, you must complete this step to synchronize the permissions.

If your location hosts have private network connectivity only, or if you use Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure hosts, you must be connected to your hosts' private network, such as through VPN access, to connect to your cluster and access the Red Hat OpenShift web console. Alternatively, if your hosts have public network connectivity, you can test access to your cluster by changing your cluster's and location's DNS records to use your hosts' public IP addresses.
Optional: Set up an internal container image registry. For more information, see Setting up the internal container image registry in the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud docs.
Set up Satellite Config.

Creating an API key

Follow the steps to create an API that can be used in your client account.

Setting up cluster admin and developer roles

Follow the steps to set up the cluster roles your client needs.