Installing Activities Plus from Component Pack 6.5.0.1

With Connections 6.5 CR1, which was released a few weeks ago, HCL also released a new version of the Component pack: Version 6.5.0.1. One of the big changes with this version was that HCL tested and validated it with more up to date versions of Kubernetes and Docker. With component pack 6.5.0.1, Kubertnetes 1.17.2 and Docker 19.0.3.5 are supported. That’s quite a big change from Kubernetes 1.11, which was the previously supported version. As the only official way to update Kubernetes from version 1.11 to version 1.17 is to install all intermediate major versions, for my demo environment I decided to uninstall the entire component pack and start from scratch. The other reason for that approach is that I soon need to install the component pack at a customer and we’ll do a fresh install with 6.5.0.1 there too.

It seems I was the first with this approach as I ran into some problems with both the documentation and the helm charts. To start with the documentation, the whole chapter about installing tools for monitoring and logging is outdated and following the documentation won’t get you anywhere. When I installed component pack 6.5, I already had to change some commands compared to the documentation as links in the documentation gave me a 404, but those changes were relatively minor. Now for the Kubernetes web based dashboard, not a single command is working anymore. When I have time to figure out what the commands ought to be, I’ll blog about it.

The subject of this blog however, is Activities Plus. If you use Kubernetes 1.17.2 with the recommended Helm 2.16.3, then following the documentation to install Activities Plus will give you the following outcome:

# helm install --name=kudos-boards-cp /root/cp651/microservices_connections/hybridcloud/helmbuilds/kudos-boards-cp-1.0.0-20200306-180701.tgz -f /tmp/boards-cp.yaml --namespace connections

Error: release kudos-boards-cp failed: Deployment.apps "kudos-boards-minio" is invalid: [spec.selector: Required value, spec.template.metadata.labels: Invalid value: map[string]string{"app":"kudos-boards-minio"}: `selector` does not match template `labels`]

Using the updated boards-cp.yaml from the website from ISW didn’t change this. The problem is with the Helm chart that comes with component pack 6.5.0.1 which is not compatible with Kubernetes 1.17.x/Helm 2.16.x. I therefore decided to send ISW a mail to ask for help. These guys are usually very responsive to support requests, but they managed to surprise me. I sent them a mail on Good Friday in my morning (as they’re in Australia, that’s their evening). Within minutes I received a response. There were more mails during the Easter weekend and on Monday morning 03:16 I received a mail with an updated Helm chart.

As a consequence of this mail thread, they have updated the troubleshooting page on Activities Plus on their website, so if you want to install Activities Plus, check out that page before you start the installation.