Installing BMC Helix IT Service Management in an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service cluster

Reference installation architecture

The following image shows the reference logical architecture used by BMC to install BMC Helix Service Management in an Amazon EKS cluster:

The following AWS services are used:

• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)—Handles the complexity of creating, storing, and renewing public and private SSL/TLS X.509 certificates and keys.
• Simple Storage Service (S3)—Is used to upload files to AWS. This object storage service provides scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
  
• Route53— Is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

Before you begin

• Make sure you have a domain and have configured DNS for the BMC Helix Service Management applications so that you can access the applications by using URLs.

  BMC certifies the use of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Route53 service to create the domain and DNS configuration.

• Make sure that you create an SSL certificate so that BMC Helix Service Management application URLs can support the HTTPS protocol.
  BMC certifies the use of the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) service to create the wildcard SSL certificate.
• Review the system requirements for BMC Helix IT Service Management installation.
• Download the installation files and container images access key from Electronic Product Download (EPD).
• Create your Harbor repository and synchronize the repository with BMC Docker Trusted Registry (DTR).

Process to install BMC Helix Service Management in an Amazon EKS cluster

The following image provides an overview of BMC Helix Service Management installation in an Amazon EKS cluster:

The following table lists the tasks to install BMC Helix Service Management in an Amazon EKS cluster:

Installing and configuring Kubernetes Ingress Nginx Controller

The Ingress Nginx Controller is a load balancer for your cluster. Install and configure Kubernetes Ingress Nginx Controller by performing the following tasks:

1. Install Kubernetes Ingress Nginx Controller 1.2.0
2. Configure a DNS record for your domain.

1. Configure the load balancer created by Ingress Controller.

To install Kubernetes Ingress Nginx Controller

1. Download the sample Ingress Nginx yaml file.
2. Modify the sample Ingress Nginx yaml file with the following details:

   1. Modify the Virtual private cloud (VPC) Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) details as follows:

      apiVersion: v1
      data:
      http-snippet: |
      server {
      listen 2443;
      return 308 https://$host$request_uri;
      }
      proxy-real-ip-cidr: 192.168.0.0/16
      use-forwarded-headers: "true"

   2. Modify the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) ID details as follows:

      metadata:
      annotations:
      service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-cert: arn:aws:acm:us-east-2:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:certificate/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx

3. In your cluster, run the following command:

   kubectl apply -f sample-ingress-controller.yaml

   Ingress Nginx Controller is deployed in the internet-ingress namespace and an external classic load balancer is created in AWS.

4. To get the address of the load balancer, run the following command:

   kubectl get svc -n internet-ingress

   Example command output:

   NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
   internet-ingress-controller LoadBalancer 10.100.180.188 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com 80:32691/TCP,443:32317/TCP 6m4s
   internet-ingress-controller-admission ClusterIP 10.100.182.96 <none> 443/TCP 6m4s

If you do not use the sample Ingress Nginx yaml file and use an alternate Ingress Nginx Controller 1.2.0, make sure that you update the config map as follows:

To configure a DNS record for your domain

Configure a DNS record for your domain so that you can access the applications by using URLs.

1. Navigate to your domain-hosted zone.

2. Create a DNS A type record for the domain to resolve URLs to the load balancer as shown in the following example:

   Record Name - *.helixonprem.com
   Type - A
   Value/Route traffic to
   - Alias to Application and Classic LoadBalancer
   - Select the region - us-east-2
   - Select the Classic LB - xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com

To configure the load balancer for the cluster

Configure the load balancer listener specifications by using the following steps:

1. In the AWS console, select the load balancer created by Ingress Controller.
2. Navigate to the Listeners tab.
3. On the Listeners tab, click Edit.
4. Update the Load Balancer Protocol value from SSL to HTTPS and HTTP mappings.

5. For HTTPS and HTTP protocols, update the Instance Protocol value to HTTP and make sure that the protocols map to the Ingress Nginx service ports.
   The following image shows an example:
   
   You can find the Ingress Nginx service port values by using the following command in your Kubernetes cluster:

   kubectl -n <ingressnamesapce> get svc

To configure the virtual memory parameter for Elasticsearch

For all worker nodes in your Amazon EKS cluster, set the sysctl -w vm.max_map_count parameter to 262144 before installing BMC Helix Platform services.

1. In your Amazon EKS cluster, connect to the worker node through Secure Shell (SSH).

2. Run the following commands on the worker node:

   sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
   echo vm.max_map_count=262144 > /etc/sysctl.d/es-custom.conf

Example of setting up an Amazon EKS cluster

The following example shows the steps for setting up an Amazon EKS cluster by using the AWS Cloud Shell:

1. Install kubectl 1.21.
   See Installing or updating kubectl in the AWS documentation.

2. Install eksctl.
   See Installing or updating eksctl in the AWS documentation.

3. Create an Amazon EKS cluster from the AWS Cloud shell.
   See Getting started with Amazon EKS – eksctl in the AWS documentation.

4. Run the following eksctl command from the AWS Cloud Shell.

   eksctl create cluster \
   --name cluster name \
   --region region name \
   --version "1.21" \
   --nodegroup-name node group name \
   --node-type type of node \
   --nodes-min minimum nodes count \
   --nodes-max maximum nodes count \
   --with-oidc \
   --ssh-access \
   --enable-ssm \
   --ssh-public-key eks-nodes \
   --asg-access \
   --external-dns-access \
   --alb-ingress-access \
   --managed
   

   After the eksctl create cluster command is complete, a kubectl configuration file located at /home/cloudshell-user/.kube/config is created.

5. Copy the config file to your local system.
   Use this file while setting up BMC Deployment Engine.