Maximo Application Suite on ROSA ( Red Hat OpenShift on AWS )

IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) is a set of applications for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance and reliability planning. When combined with Red Hat OpenShift on AWS ( ROSA ), this frees up your Maximo and operations team to focus on what is important to them ( Maximo ) rather than having to worry about managing and building clusters.

This document outlines how to get quickly get started with ROSA and installing Maximo all through automation.

Prerequisites

• a ROSA Cluster (see Deploying ROSA with Terraform )

Note: Please check the latest Maximo support matrix, at the time of this writing, OpenShift 4.14 is latest OpenShift version supported by Maximo.

• oc cli
• aws cli
• ansible cli
• a Maximo License Key
  

Note: You must log into your ROSA cluster via your oc cli before going through the following steps.

Prepare the Environment

Note: This guide re-uses environment variables from the Deploying a ROSA HCP cluster with Terraform guide. If you have an existing cluster, you’ll need to set them appropriately for the cluster.

1. Run this these commands to set some environment variables to use throughout (Terraform commands need to be run in the directory you ran Terraform)
   

Maximo environment variables.

You do need both an IBM entitlement key and a Maximo license ID and file. These can be obtained from IBM.

OpenShift Environment Variables

Prepare the Storage Accounts for MAS

The first step is to add AWS EFS to our cluster. The following guide covers the minimum instructions to add EFS for Maximo, a complete guide on adding EFS to ROSA is here

In order to use the AWS EFS CSI Driver we need to create IAM roles and policies that can be attached to the Operator.

1. Create an IAM Policy

2. Create the Policy

   This creates a named policy for the cluster, you could use a generic policy for multiple clusters to keep things simpler.

3. Create a Trust Policy

4. Create Role for the EFS CSI Driver Operator

5. Attach the Policies to the Role

Deploy the AWS EFS Operator

1. Create a Secret to tell the AWS EFS Operator which IAM role to request.

2. Install the EFS Operator

3. Wait until the Operator is running

4. Install the AWS EFS CSI Driver

5. Wait until the CSI driver is running

Prepare an AWS EFS Volume for dynamic provisioning

1. Run this set of commands to update the VPC to allow EFS access

2. Assuming the CIDR and SG are correct, update the security group

At this point you can create either a single Zone EFS filesystem, or a Region wide EFS filesystem

Creating a region-wide EFS

1. Create a region-wide EFS File System

2. Configure a region-wide Mount Target for EFS (this will create a mount point in each subnet of your VPC by default)

Create a storage class for EFS

1. Create a Storage Class for the EFS volume

Install IBM Maximo Application Suite with Ansible

IBM has provided an ansible playbook to automate the installation of Maximo and all the required dependencies making it very easy and repeatable to get started with Maximo.

Click here to learn more about the OneClick Install of Maximo.

1. Install the Maximo Ansible collection

1. Run the Ansible playbook

And that’s it!! … it will take about 90 minutes for the installation to complete follow along the ansible log messages if you like.

You can also open the OpenShift web console and view the projects and resources the playbook is creating.

When the playbook finishes, you will see the following showing the installation is complete along with the MAS Admin Dashboard with username and password to use.

Open the MAS Dashboard URL in your browser and log in with the given username and password.

Note: If you are using the default aroapp.io domain that comes with ARO, the URL will show it’s insecure due to an untrusted CA. For a production level Maximo installation with ARO, the cluster should be created with a custom domain where you control the certificates. Follow these directions from IBM in manually appling the certificates for MAS.

If you see a blue spinning circle from the admin page like this:

In the browswer, change admin to api and hit enter. For example: change https://admin.inst1.apps.mobb.eastus.aroapp.io/ to https://api.inst1.apps.mobb.eastus.aroapp.io/

This will return a message like the following:

Try to load the admin screen and this time it should work.

Install Maximo Applications ( Optional )

Optionally install Maximo applications you would like to use. In this example, we will install IT and Asset Configuration Manager.

On the Admin page, click on Catalog and then under applications click on Manage.

Select both IT and Asset Configuration Manager and then clikc on Continue.

Keep the defaults and click on Subscribe to channel. Note that this can take 10+ minutes.

Once you see thate Manage is ready to be activated, click on Activate

Finally, click on Start activation on the next screen. Note that this step can take several hours.