John Q. Todd

Sr. Business Consultant/Product Researcher

Total Resource Management (TRM), Inc. 

Much has already been discussed and debated about the hardware/hosting requirements needed to support Maximo Application Suite (MAS) on the new Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS) operating environment. As with any enterprise application suite, the necessary computing resources to support the User communities are nothing to sneeze at.

However, for the more modest needs of development, test, or demo environments, IBM has provided an approach to stand these up for much lower hosting costs and certainly lower effort. SNO consists of an OpenShift cluster and a single control plane to run smaller workloads with no dependance on a centralized management cluster.

Standing up a SNO environment is a great way to get up to speed with RHOS operations, looking forward to when your company makes the trek from your current Maximo 7.6.x to MAS 8.x.

You might also consider the use of SNO for those “edge,” installations that may not always be connected in real-time to the larger corporate MAS instances.

This article is not going to get into the system requirements, or the technical steps needed to stand up SNO. You can find that degree of information via the links at the end.

Where to begin…

To start you need a place to stand up SNO. This could be a local physical server or perhaps a virtual server out in the cloud. Since your focus is not a production instance, where SNO is installed is not a great concern.

Further, the intent at the moment is that SNO will only support the Manage component of MAS, the compute requirements are certainly less than if the full complement of MAS components were deployed.

You will need an entitlement to SNO and MAS via your Passport Advantage account, as well as the MAS license file from the IBM License Key Center.

Of course, you need to have Docker… perhaps in the form of Docker Desktop… installed on the server, or even your desktop computing device if that is to be your “server.”

It is worth mentioning that while you need to have purchased AppPoints to gain the entitlements to SNO/MAS, and a license file will be added to the instance upon deployment. Since this is a non-production instance, their use does not count towards your AppPoint usage metrics.

What you get… don’t get…

Unlike a production-level RHOS environment, SNO provides only a single control and worker nodes. There is no high-availability requirement expected from SNO (at the moment!), so this barebones situation is reasonable.

The SNO setup process first installs the “MAS Core,” and all the necessary elements that make up MAS. The MongoDB, storage classes, etc. are all present when the installation is finished.

Of course, the underlying database is IBM db2. However, the installation process does create the JDBC connections if the other supported databases (Oracle and MS SQL) are going to be used.

Then the install process provides you with the MAS admin level User login information, enabling you to enter MAS, deploy and then activate Manage.

Be sure to note that the Maximo Mobile applications are also included in the deployment. Your application developers can now establish connections to the RHOS container and the MAS instance. They can launch the Maximo Application Framework (MAF) set of tools and/or connect a more comprehensive development environment such as Eclipse or VS Code for more significant app development activities.

For more information, TRM has several videos on our YouTube channel about the MAF. Like, Subscribe, and ring that bell!

And finally, all the Industry Solutions and Add-Ons are present for deployment as well. The MASADMIN User can view and select from the MAS Catalog which to deploy into Manage.

Wrap up

In the end, standing up a SNO instance might take an hour of your time. You will have access to a fully functional RHOS environment to learn with. You also get the familiar Manage with the potential for checking out the Industry Solutions/Add-ons, and the full complement of Maximo Mobile applications.

Here are some helpful links that IBM provides with all the details you need to stand up SNO:

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/asset-facilities/blogs/brian-zhu/2022/09/09/running-mas-manage-maximo-8x-on-a-single-node-open
https://ibm-mas-manage.github.io/sno/

TRM as an IBM business partner, was an early adopter of MAS so we have been working with it for a number of years already. Our list of clients who either have or are migrating from legacy Maximo to MAS is growing every month. Make contact and let’s see how we might be able to help you along your Maximo journey.