Installing Component Pack services

Prepare the installation of the Component Pack for HCL Connections™ by determining which Helm charts you need for the deployment.

Before you begin

Before you start the installation, verify that the following requirements have been satisfied:

  • All Prerequisites for Component Pack are in place.

  • An ImagePullSecret called myregkey must be created if you are using a private Docker registry (see Prerequisites for Component Pack); otherwise pods will fail to start with the error: ErrImagePull

  • All persistent volumes are configured.

  • Your Connections deployment is running.

    Component Pack for Connections requires Connections 6.0 CR1 or higher with the following fixes:

    • If you are using CR3 or CR4, all required fixes are included.
    • If you are using CR2, make sure that the following fixes have been downloaded from HCL FlexNet portal (if applicable to your deployment):
      • For Customizer: Connections 6.0 CR1 iFix 6.0.0.0_CR1-IC-Common-IFLO94070.jar (APAR LO94070)
    • If you are using CR1, make sure that the following fixes have been downloaded from HCL FlexNet portal (if applicable to your deployment):
      • For Orient Me: Connections 6.0 CR1 iFix 6.0.0.0_CR1-IC-Common-IFLO93624 (APAR LO93624)
      • For Elasticsearch Metrics: Connections 6.0 CR1 iFix 6.0.0.0-IC-Multi-IFLO93386 (APAR LO93386)
      • For Customizer: Connections 6.0 CR1 iFix 6.0.0.0_CR1-IC-Common-IFLO94070.jar (APAR LO94070)

  • All Component Pack servers can reach the Connections servers.

About this task

Component Pack for Connections consists of three offerings: Orient Me, Elasticsearch, and Customizer. Each offering is delivered as a set of Docker images and the Helm charts for installing them; these are all included in the Component Pack installation package. Table 1 shows which Helm charts are required for each offering (a check mark indicates a required Helm chart).

Table 1. Helm charts required for the Component Pack offerings

Helm chart

 Customizer Elasticsearch Orient Me
connections-env Chart is required Chart is required Chart is required
bootstrap Chart is required Chart is required Chart is required
infrastructure Chart is required Chart is required
mw-proxy Chart is required
elasticsearch Chart is required Recommended*
orientme Chart is required
cnx-ingress Chart is required Chart is required
*It is best to use Elasticsearch as the storage and retrieval service for Orient Me Top Updates. Otherwise, Solr is used by default.
Table 2 describes the optional Helm charts that are also included in the Component Pack installation package.
Table 2. Optional Helm charts in the Component Pack installation package
Helm chart Description
k8s-psp Set the Pod Security Policies that are required for Component Pack pods to run. Only required if the PodSecurityPolicy admission plugin is enabled in your cluster. See Pod Security Policies
sanity Sanity provides a dashboard where you can monitor the health of all applications running within the Component Pack. For more information, see Using Sanity to monitor Component Pack.
sanity-watcher Monitors the helm list of installed releases and upgrades sanity with the latest list of services to monitor when it detects that any helm release has been added or removed.
connections-persistent-storage-nfs Helm chart to set up and configure the required persistent volumes using NFS.
esbackuprestore Helm chart to backup or restore data for Elasticsearch-based components.
elasticstack Helm chart that deploys Filebeat, Logstash and Kibana,which integrate with the Component Pack Elasticsearch offering to provide a centralized logging solution. (Requires Elasticsearch helm chart to be deployed).

Procedure

  1. Download the Component Pack installation kit from HCL FlexNet portal.
  2. Complete the following tasks to install Component Pack services.