We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of the OpenShift Assisted Installer for OpenShift. 

While clusters deployed with the OpenShift Assisted Installer have been and are supported, the hosted Assisted Installer itself has been a Technology Preview, until now.

What’s the OpenShift Assisted Installer?

OpenShift Assisted Installer provides an easy way to install OpenShift on your nodes from the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. The installer is a managed service to install OpenShift clusters on bare metal (though not restricted to). It doesn’t require a bootstrap node and it doesn’t need you to pre-install Red Hat CoreOS on your nodes before installing the cluster, you just add your cluster’s information to the web UI and boot your nodes with a provided ISO image (see demo below).

It has been available for a number of releases as a Technology Preview and during this time we have received great user feedback. Adoption and number of clusters deployed continue to grow daily.

OpenShift Assisted Installer features

We have written blog posts about using Assisted Installer. Today, we’d like to highlight some of the features you will find in the GA release. In the process to GA and through all the releases, we have added many features, fixes, and enhancements. Here’s a list of features you can now experience as part of the general availability.

Full stack automation

• Hosted at Openshift Cloud Manager at cloud.redhat.com
• Simple web UI-based flow
• REST API - fully api driven
• Progress monitor and error handling
• Cluster-managed built-in load balancer and internal DNS

Multiple OpenShift topologies

• 3-node compact clusters
• Single-node OpenShift clusters
• Standard multi-node clusters
• Schedulable masters

Simplified prerequisites 

• No dedicated bootstrap node needed
• No DHCP hostname allocation
• Host call home model (simplified network model)

Pre-install Validations

• Minimum host requirements
• Network connectivity/address matrix

Smart defaults

• Auto CIDR generation (based on available networks)
• Auto node role assignment
• All OpenShift cluster topologies

Networking

• OpenShift SDN and OVN network types
• Proxy support
• IPv6/IPv4 Dual-stack via API

Other features

• Deploy Multiple OCP releases
• OpenShift on ARM
• Integration with OpenShift Data Foundation
• Integration with vSphere platform (Technology Preview)
• Cluster customizations
• Disk partitioning

Demo