Prerequisites for installing the server software in an air-gapped environment

You must complete certain tasks before you install Rational® Test Automation Server in an air-gapped environment on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

The following sections describe each prerequisite in detail:

Entitlement key

You must copy the Entitlement key from the Container software library to pull the images that are used by the server software. For more information, refer to Creating an API key.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

You must install Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and have cluster administrator privileges. For more information, refer to the Installing section of Red Hat OpenShift documentation.
Note:

For more information about specific versions of software requirements, see System Requirements.

You can run the following command on the OpenShift command-line interface to gain cluster administrator access:
oc login -u kubeadmin -p {password} https://api.{openshift-cluster-dns-name}:6443
Note: You can run the following command to obtain the default value of openshift-cluster-dns-name: 
oc get --namespace=openshift-ingress-operator ingresscontroller/default -ojsonpath='{.status.domain}'

Bastion host

You must set up a Bastion host that has Linux installed. You must also have internet access.

A bastion host is a server that is provisioned with a public IP address and must be accessible through remote access Secure Shell (SSH).
Note: You must ensure that the Bastion host has access to your OCP cluster.

For more information refer to the IBM Cloud Docs.

Docker registry

You must set up a local Docker registry to store the images of Rational® Test Automation Server and ensure that it has access to the OCP cluster and the Bastion host.

For more information refer to the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

Mandatory software

You must install the following software on Red Hat OpenShift:

  • OpenShift command-line interface (CLI) on the Bastion host. For more information, refer to the Getting started with the CLI section in the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

  • IBM Cloud Pak CLI (cloudctl) on the Bastion host to manage Container Application Software for Enterprises (CASE). For more information, refer to the cloud-pak-cli repository.

  • Installed Helm V3.5.2. For more information, refer to the Installing a Helm chart on an OpenShift Container Platform cluster section in the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

Service virtualization through Istio

Disclaimer: This release contains access to the Istio virtualized services feature in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server as a Tech Preview. The Tech Preview is intended for you to view the capabilities of virtualized services offered by Rational® Test Automation Server, and to provide your feedback to the product team. You are permitted to use the information only for evaluation purposes and not for use in a production environment. IBM provides the information without obligation of support and "as is" without warranty of any kind.

To provide your feedback, you can send an email to devops24@us.ibm.com.

The default configuration does not enable service virtualization through Istio. To use the service virtualization feature through Istio, you must configure it appropriately. As a Tech Preview feature, you can virtualize the bookinfo sample application.

You must install the bookinfo application in the Bookinfo namespace because Rational® Test Automation Server supports service virtualization through Istio only for the bookinfo sample application.

For more information about the bookinfo application, refer to the Istio documentation.

Service virtualization usage metrics

You must perform the following tasks so that Rational® Test Automation Server shows the correct usage of service virtualization metrics: