IBM WebSphere Application Server for IBM Cloud Private VM Quickstarter provides the WebSphere product experience in a cloud environment by enabling self-service creation of preconfigured WebSphere environments running in virtual machines. Throughout this document, the service is also referred to as WAS VM Quickstarter.

The WAS VM Quickstarter brings the WebSphere experience to the cloud so that you can leverage existing scripts and skills to provide a supported, cloud-managed environment for hosting WebSphere applications. WebSphere Application Server provides flexible, secure Java runtimes that easily serve up everything from single, lightweight applications and microservices to large enterprise cloud deployments.

The service management console installed by this Helm chart provides the self-service portal that is used to create and manage VM-based WAS assets. Behind the scenes, the service console applications use IBM Cloud Automation Manager to provide the orchestrations that stand up these deployments in a VMWare datacenter that you define in the Helm chart.

See Installing WAS VM Quickstarter for a complete set of installation instructions for the service. This Helm chart is a part of the overall installation instructions.

The Helm chart deploys the following components:

• wasaas-console Kubernetes pod which hosts the self-service console application.
• wasaas-broker Kubernetes pod which hosts the self-service REST APIs.
• wasaas-cloudsm-frontend Kubernetes pod which hosts the front end of the service management framework.
• wasaas-cloudsm-backend Kubernetes pod which hosts the back end of the service management framework.
• wasaas-couchdb Kubernetes pod which hosts the CouchDB NoSQL datastore that stores the service management data for the service.
• wasaas-dashboard Kubernetes pod which hosts the administrative dashboard application.
• wasaas-devops Kubernetes pod which hosts devops scripts, such as must-gather and installation verification test (IVT) scripts.
• Ingresses for the wasaas-console, wasaas-dashboard, and wasaas-broker pods.

The following prerequisites apply only to deploying the Helm chart. For a detailed list of system installation prerequisites, see WAS VM Quickstarter Prerequisites.

A cluster administrator is required for OIDC registration for UI components and for creating custom cluster security policies.

This chart requires a PodSecurityPolicy to be bound to the target namespace prior to installation. You can either use a predefined PodSecurityPolicy or have your cluster administrator set up a custom PodSecurityPolicy for you.

The chart can be used with the ibm-anyuid-psp predefined PodSecurityPolicy.

To set up a custom PodSecurityPolicy, the cluster administrator can either manually create the following resources, or use the configuration scripts to create and delete the resources.

• Custom PodSecurityPolicy definition:

  apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
  kind: PodSecurityPolicy
  metadata:
    name: ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-psp
  spec:
    allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
    forbiddenSysctls:
    - '*'
    fsGroup:
      rule: RunAsAny
    requiredDropCapabilities:
    - ALL
    allowedCapabilities:
    - CHOWN
    - DAC_OVERRIDE
    - KILL
    - FOWNER
    - SETUID
    - SETGID
    runAsUser:
      rule: RunAsAny
    seLinux:
      rule: RunAsAny
    supplementalGroups:
      rule: RunAsAny
    volumes:
    - configMap
    - emptyDir
    - projected
    - secret
    - downwardAPI
    - persistentVolumeClaim

• Custom ClusterRole for the custom PodSecurityPolicy:

  apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
  kind: ClusterRole
  metadata:
    name: ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-clusterrole
  rules:
  - apiGroups:
    - extensions
    resourceNames:
    - ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-psp
    resources:
    - podsecuritypolicies
    verbs:
    - use

  Configuration scripts can be used to create the required resources

  Download the following scripts located at /ibm_cloud_pak/pak_extensions/pre-install directory.

  • The pre-install instructions are located at clusterAdministration/createSecurityClusterPrereqs.sh for cluster administrators to create the PodSecurityPolicy and ClusterRole for all releases of this chart.

  • The namespace scoped instructions are located at namespaceAdministration/createSecurityNamespacePrereqs.sh for team administrators/operators to create the RoleBinding for the namespace. This script takes one argument; the name of a pre-existing namespace where the chart will be installed.

    • Example usage: ./createSecurityNamespacePrereqs.sh myNamespace

  Configuration scripts can be used to clean up resources created

  Download the following scripts located at /ibm_cloud_pak/pak_extensions/post-delete directory.

  • The post-delete instructions are located at clusterAdministration/deleteSecurityClusterPrereqs.sh for cluster administrators to delete the PodSecurityPolicy and ClusterRole for all releases of this chart.

  • The namespace scoped instructions are located at namespaceAdministration/deleteSecurityNamespacePrereqs.sh for team administrators/operators to delete the RoleBinding for the namespace. This script takes one argument; the name of the namespace where the chart was installed.

    • Example usage: ./deleteSecurityNamespacePrereqs.sh myNamespace

The WAS VM Quickstarter service requires the following persistent volumes:

• CouchDB volume for service management data (10 GB or larger)

  The WAS VM Quickstarter service requires a persistent volume to host a CouchDB database to store service data. The volume relates the data for a particular service instance to the specific resources that are assigned to the service instance. The volume must be configured with a storage capacity of at least 10 GB.

• Optional: Migration volume (10 GB or larger)

  If the optional migration feature is enabled, a persistent volume is required to hold migration artifacts until the target WebSphere server or cell is provisioned. The migration persistent volume must reference an NFS server and have a storage capacity of at least 10 GB.

You can either define your persistent volumes in a YAML file or in the IBM Cloud Private user interface.

Create a pv.yaml file that defines the CouchDB volume. Use the values in the following example, replacing the items in <brackets>. This example uses an NFS server, but you can use any shared server supported by IBM Cloud Private. The NFS or other shared server must be set up before you create the persistent volume.

kind: PersistentVolume
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
 name: data-<release-name>-ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-couchdb-0
 labels:
   component: "couchdb"
   release: "<release-name>"
spec:
 capacity:
   storage: 10Gi
 accessModes:
 - ReadWriteOnce
 persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
 nfs:
   path: /nfs/wasaas/<environment-name>/couchdb-0
   server: <nfs-server-address>

Run the following command to create the volume:

kubectl create -f pv.yaml

Optional: If you want to enable migration, create an additional persistent volume pv-migration.yaml file and use the values in the following example, replacing the items in <brackets>. This persistent volume will be used by the migration feature.

kind: PersistentVolume
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: data-<release-name>-ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-migration
  labels:
    component: "migration"
    release: "<release-name>"
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 10Gi
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteMany
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  nfs:
    path: /nfs/wasaas/<environment-name>/<release-name>/migration
    server: <nfs-server-address>

Run the following command to create the migration volume:

kubectl create -f pv-migration.yaml

For more information about performing a migration, see Migrating applications to WAS VM Quickstarter.

For information about creating persistent volumes by using the user interface, see Creating a PersistentVolume in the IBM Cloud Private documentation. Use the corresponding values from the YAML example

The WAS VM Quickstarter service also requires a secret to be created that contains CAM administrator user name and password.

You can either define the secret using the kubectl command or in the IBM Cloud Private user interface.

For example, when using kubectl, run the following command to create the secret:

kubectl create secret generic cam-credentials --from-literal='username=myadmin' --from-literal='password=mypassword'

You will need to pass the secret name as the cam.secret parameter during Helm chart installation.

For a detailed list of required system resources such as CPU, memory, and disk space, see WAS VM Quickstarter Prerequisites.

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm install --tls --name my-release stable/ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-dev

The command deploys ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-dev on the Kubernetes cluster in the default namespace. The configuration section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list --tls.

Verify that your Kubernetes pods were deployed successfully. See the instruction after the Helm installation completes. The instruction can also be displayed by viewing the installed Helm release under Menu -> Workloads -> Helm Releases or by running the command: helm status <release> --tls.

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete --tls --purge my-release

The command removes all of the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

The following tables lists the configurable parameters of the ibm-was-vm-quickstarter-dev chart and their default values.

You should create a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters that can be used when installing the chart. Alternatively, specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument when you run the helm install command.

• You can deploy the Helm chart multiple times by using different Helm releases. If you target the same Cloud Automation Manager and vSphere environments, care must be given to set the capacity and IP addresses to not collide with other instances of the WAS VM Quickstarter service.
• WAS VM Quickstarter supports x86-64 platforms only.

See the following pages within this documentation:

• WAS VM Quickstarter Prerequisites
• Setting Up the Content Runtime
• Migrating Applications to WAS VM Quickstarter
• Administering WAS VM Quickstarter

• Setting up WebSphere Application Server on IBM Cloud Private with the WAS VM Quickstarter
• WebSphere Application Server V9.0 documentation
• WebSphere Application Server Liberty documentation