Using Operator Lifecycle Manager in disconnected environments

For OKD clusters in disconnected environments, Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) by default cannot access the Red Hat-provided OperatorHub sources hosted on remote registries because those remote sources require full internet connectivity.

However, as a cluster administrator you can still enable your cluster to use OLM in a disconnected environment if you have a workstation that has full internet access. The workstation, which requires full internet access to pull the remote OperatorHub content, is used to prepare local mirrors of the remote sources, and push the content to a mirror registry.

The mirror registry can be located on a bastion host, which requires connectivity to both your workstation and the disconnected cluster, or a completely disconnected, or airgapped, host, which requires removable media to physically move the mirrored content to the disconnected environment.

This guide describes the following process that is required to enable OLM in disconnected environments:

After enabling OLM in a disconnected environment, you can continue to use your unrestricted workstation to keep your local OperatorHub sources updated as newer versions of Operators are released.

For more information, see Using Operator Lifecycle Manager in disconnected environments in the Disconnected environments section.