Prerequisites to install the server software on Ubuntu

You must complete certain tasks before you install Rational® Test Automation Server on the Ubuntu platform.

The following sections describe prerequisites in detail:

Internet access

You must have access to the internet to install Rational® Test Automation Server.

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.

Ubuntu Server

You must install the supported version of Ubuntu Server and have a working Domain Name Server (DNS) that resolves the hostname into a machine-readable IP address.

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

Note: Depending on your testing workload, Rational® Test Automation Server might require more resources. You must use the entire disk space and set up Logical Volume Manager (LVM) by using the ext4 file system. If your organization requires user data to be stored in a separate partition, then you can create a mount point at /var/lib/rancher/k3s/storage/ with at least 128 GB capacity.

Backup of user data

If you want to upgrade Rational® Test Automation Server from a previous version, then you must perform one of the following tasks based on the existing version of the server software:

  • Back up the data from V10.0.2, Fix Pack 1 or earlier. See Backing up the user data from a previous release.

  • Back up the data from V10.1.0 or later. See Backing up the server data on Ubuntu.
    Note: You must select the existing version of Rational® Test Automation Server from the drop-down list to view the procedure to back up and restore the user data for your version because the instructions differ for different versions.

Mandatory software

You must install the following mandatory software:

  • Helm. For more information, refer to the Helm documentation. For more information about specific versions of software requirements, see System Requirements.
    Note: The Helm command must be in one of the directories in your PATH environment variable.

  • OpenSSH Server. For more information, refer to the Installation section in the OpenSSH Server documentation.

    Note: If you use ssh to log in to the computer, then you can skip this step because OpenSSH is already installed on your computer.

k3s environment

You must set up the Kubernetes environment (k3s) along with other configurations such as firewall, Jaeger, and Prometheus server. See Setting up a Kubernetes environment (k3s) on Ubuntu.

Optional software

You can install the Jaeger operator to trace test logs and Jaeger-based reports when you run tests. For more information, refer to the Jaeger documentation.

You can then configure Rational® Test Automation Server to use Jaeger traces by passing the following parameters during the installation of the server software:

--set global.jaegerDashboard.externalURL={my-jaeger-dashboard-url} \
--set global.jaegerAgent.internalHostName=localhost

Where {my-jaeger-dashboard-url} is the URL of the Jaeger server.

If you use the default values during the installation of Jaeger as suggested in the Jaeger documentation, then you must pass the following parameters during the installation of the server software:
--set global.jaegerDashboard.externalURL=https://$INGRESS_DOMAIN/jaeger \
--set global.jaegerAgent.internalHostName=jaeger-agent.observability

Where $INGRESS_DOMAIN is the IP address of Jaeger.

Note: You can run the following command to get the value of $INGRESS_DOMAIN:
kubectl get ingress

Collection of usage metrics

If you want Rational® Test Automation Server to display the usage statistics of the virtual service instances, you must install the Prometheus server at the time of server installation.