Red Hat OpenShift architecture
As of 17 July 2025, new automated installations of Red Hat® OpenShift® for VMware® are no longer available for new or existing deployments of VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic - Automated instances. You can still use or delete your existing Red Hat OpenShift for VMware automated installations until 16 July 2026. The service will no longer be available from 17 July 2026.
The IBM Cloud® for VMware Solutions offerings provide automation to deploy VMware® technology components in IBM Cloud data centers across the globe. The architecture consists of a single cloud region. It supports the ability to extend into more cloud regions that are located in another geography or into another IBM Cloud pod within the same data center.
Bastion hosts
The Management host is a Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 8.0 virtual machine (VM). This VM hosts services to install and configure the Red Hat® OpenShift® instance and provides utilities to manage the Red Hat OpenShift environment. This host is normally deployed in the VXLAN Subnet.
Bootstrap hosts
The bootstrap node is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), a new container-oriented operating system designed for running containers. The node is a temporary node that is used to start the installation.
Control Plane hosts
The control plane hosts are Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), a new container-oriented operating system designed for running containers. The control plane nodes are known as the control plane, where Kubernetes services such as API server,
etcd, and controller manager are defined. An NSX® load balancer is configured to spread load across these VMs for ports 6443 and 22623, exposing the api and api-int functions.
Worker hosts
The worker hosts are Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), a new container-oriented operating system designed for running containers. The worker nodes are known as the data-plane, where the actual Kubernetes workloads are deployed. An NSX load balancer is configured to spread load across these VMs for ports 80 and 443, exposing the wildcard DNS and *.apps.
Common services
The Red Hat OpenShift deployment uses the following components of the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions SDDC architecture to help with the execution and installation:
- Time services
- Domain name resolution
- NSX load balancers
- NSX DHCP services
- NSX software defined networking
For more information, see IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions SDDC architecture.