Before you begin deploying

Confirm your IBM Cloud® settings

Complete the following steps before you deploy the IBM® Storage Scale:

1. Confirm that you have an IBM Cloud Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account. If you have a Trial or Lite account, upgrade your account.

2. Log in to your IBM Cloud account with your IBMid.

Prerequisites

As an admin, you need to have the following permissions to perform the deployment:

• Administrator for All Identity and Access enabled service
• Administrator for IAM Identity Service
• Administrator for All Account Management services

Setting IAM permissions - CLI

Before deploying an IBM® Storage Scale cluster, specific IAM permissions must be assigned to either a user or an access group. The automation script enables this process.

User has the flexibility to run the specific scripts to gain the required IAM permissions to perform the cluster deployment. The automation ensures that if the user has a certain permission, then the script omits them and add only the required permissions to perform the deployment.

For example, for the App configuration service, the user requires Administrator and Manager permissions. If the user already has the Administrator permission, then the script omits this and provide only Manager permission.

Benefits of the scripts:

• Interactive input collection - The script prompts for the IBMid (admin email), Account ID, and target (User or Access Group).
• Permission check - The script verifies that the admin has account-level Administrator rights, which are required to assign policies.
• Assigns required permissions for Scale deployment - This script grants the appropriate permissions across IBM Cloud services that Storage Scale depends upon (for example, VPC, COS, DNS services, KMS, Secrets Manager, and Sysdig Monitoring).
• Avoids duplicates - The script skips the assignment if a matching policy already exists.

You can get the scripts by performing gitclone on the branch:

git clone -b main https://github.com/terraform-ibm-modules/terraform-ibm-hpc.git

1. Login to the IBM Cloud CLI with your API key. Run the following command:

   ibmcloud login --apikey <YOUR_API_KEY> -g <RESOURCE_GROUP>
   

2. Navigate to cd tools/access-management, you get the permissions.sh file.

   chmod +x permissions.sh
   

   To update the script permissions, run ./permissions.sh command.

3. Enter the admin email or IBMid.

4. Enter the Account ID.

   For the Account ID, login to the IBM Cloud account by using your unique credentials. Go to Manage > Account > Account settings. You will find the Account ID.

5. You are asked to assign the roles:

   1. Access Group - Select this option, if you want to assign the access to the entire access group.
   2. User - Select this option, if you want to assign the access to an individual user.

   Select the required option.

6. Enter the target user email, if you select the option 2.

7. User policy is successfully created.

If the user skips to enter the ACCOUNT_ID, then script displays the error message:

:x: ACCOUNT_ID is required.

This script ensures the user or access group has all the required IAM permissions to successfully deploy a Storage Scale environment.

Setting IAM permissions - UI

IBM Cloud® Identity and Access Management (IAM) access policies are required to install this deployable architecture and provision clusters.

To view access policies, complete the following steps:

1. In the IBM Cloud console, select Manage > Access (IAM).

2. In the IAM navigation menu, select Users and then select the account user.

3. Select Access to view the associated access policies and access groups. See the following table for the permissions that you need for this deployable architecture:

   Verify access policies

   Service	Resources	Platform roles	Service roles
   App configuration	All	Administrator	Manager
   All Identity and Access enabled services	All	Administrator	Manager
   All Account Management services	All	Administrator	--
   Cloud Object Storage	All	Service Configuration Reader	Writer
   DNS Services	All	Editor	Manager
   IAM Identity Service	All	Administrator	--
   IBM Key Protect	All	Service Configuration Reader	Manager
   Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection	All	Administrator	--
   Secrets Manager	All	Administrator	Manager
   VPC Infrastructure Services	All	Administrator	--

   The above-mentioned permissions are mandatory, failing to have these permissions lead to deployment failure. Contact the account administrator for the permissions.

Before you begin

The deployment is performed using Terraform and IBM Projects. Once the necessary input values are gathered to define your cluster configuration, you are ready to deploy your IBM Storage Scale cluster. For more information, see Deploying IBM Storage Scale.

To get started with the deployment, complete the following steps:

Create an IBM Cloud API key

Verify whether you have an IBM Cloud API key. ibmcloud_api_key is the value required for this variable. For more information, see Creating an API key.

Create SSH key

Create SSH keys in your IBM Cloud account. If you want to use multiple SSH keys to access the bastion host, compute cluster, and storage cluster, ensure that the SSH keys are present in the same resource group and region where the cluster is provisioned. You can select the required SSH key for the supported region/zone from the drop-down list. ssh_keys is the value required for this variable. For more information, see Managing SSH keys.

In the UI, the drop-down lists all the available ssh keys from all the regions. If you have a similar name across all the region and you click the drop down, then all the keys are selected but the right SSH key will be picked only in the back-end based upon the input provided for the zones.

Set the remote_allowed_ips

You need to provide your public IP addresses from where you want to access the environment after it is provisioned. You provide these public IP addresses in the remote_allowed_ips deployment value. For more information, see Deployment values.

If this field is left empty (for example, [""]) or not provided, then the cluster deployment fails during the initial setup phase. It is essential to supply a valid entry to proceed with a successful deployment.

Set the storage_gui_username

You need to provide the username to access the GUI to perform the system management and monitoring tasks on the storage cluster. storage_gui_username is the value required for this variable.

Set the storage_gui_password

You need to provide the password to access the GUI to perform the system management and monitoring tasks on the storage cluster. storage_gui_password is the value required for this variable.

Provide the zones

Choose the IBM Cloud region and availability zone where you want to deploy your cluster. You provide this location information to configure your workspace. zones is the value required for this variable. For more information, see Region and data center locations for resource deployment.

You can view or set the optional values by toggling the Advanced option in the UI.

Enabling optional features

After completing the mandatory steps, you can enable the optional features by looking into the input values in the Storage Scale cluster. For example, to enable the encryption, you need to set the scale_encryption_type value.

Accessing the deployed environment

The values for remote_allowed_ips must be provided to identify a list of IP addresses of systems that can access the bastion node. All the cluster nodes can be directly accessed through bastion nodes.

Deployer node:

ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -J ubuntu@<replace this with your bastion_node IP address> vpcuser@<replace this with your deployer_node IP address>

Scale Storage node:

ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -J ubuntu@<replace this with your bastion_node IP address> vpcuser@<replace this with your storage node IP address>

After cluster deployment, executing any scale commands requires root access to the solution nodes. However, when these commands are run using sudo su -, the following errors are encountered:

[vpcuser@scale-strg-8017-001 ~]$ mmgetstate -a
-bash: /usr/lpp/mmfs/bin/mmces: Permission denied

To execute any scale commands, switch to the root user using sudo su.