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Installing an OpenShift Environment
To test the metadata files you will need access to an OpenShift environment. If you don't have an environment setup, there are several options available depending on your requirements. Red Hat provides try.openshift.com which lists several infrastructure providers with varying levels of maturity for you to choose from. You have the option to choose between OpenShift Container Platform 4 on popular cloud and virtualization providers, as well as bare metal, including a local deployment method using CodeReady Containers. The characteristics of each offering are outlined further below.
OpenShift Container Platform 4 (OCP 4) is the enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform that’s ready for deployments on these infrastructure providers:
- Cloud: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
- Virtualization: VMware vSphere, Red Hat OpenStack Platform
- Bare Metal
Deploying to a public cloud provider requires an account with the provider, and will incur hourly use charges for the utilized infrastructure.
Deploying to virtual platforms and bare metal will require a paid OpenShift subscription or a partner NFR subscription for OpenShift, in addition to providing the platform and/or infrastructure for the installation.
Applications with high or specialized resource requirements are best suited for an OCP cluster. For testing application scaling or other operational tasks, an OCP cluster is recommended. Infrastructure scalability inherent in these infrastructure providers affords OpenShift this ability in an OCP deployment.
You can install OCP 4 by going to try.openshift.com and clicking Get Started (you will need to login with a Red Hat account), and then selecting the infrastructure provider of your choice. You can also install OCP 4 using the official documentation. You can also reference the AWS Quick Start Guide in the appendix.
CodeReady Containers provides a minimal OpenShift 4 cluster to developers, free of cost. It consists of a single OpenShift node running as a virtual machine for offline development and testing on a laptop or desktop.
For more information about CodeReady Containers please visit https://developers.redhat.com/products/codeready-containers/overview
Requirements
CodeReady Containers runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and requires the following minimum system requirements:
- 4 virtual CPUs (vCPUs)
- 8 GB of memory
- 35 GB of storage space
As described previously, applications will be limited to the resources provided by the host. If you desire to run resource intensive applications in CodeReady Containers, you can increase the size of the VM (CPU & RAM) at runtime.
Not all OpenShift features are available within the CodeReady Containers deployment. The following limitations exist:
- Operators for machine-config and monitoring are disabled by default, so the corresponding functions of the web console are non-functioning.
- Due to this, there is currently no upgrade path to newer versions of OpenShift.
- External networking and ingress does not function identically to an OCP 4 cluster due to running in a local virtual machine.
- Operational tasks, such as rebooting the CodeReady Containers VM are disruptive to applications. Such high availability is not achievable with a single node cluster.
- Custom network operators cannot be installed because the installation is not user configurable.
- Each binary release of CodeReady Containers expires after 30 days. You will then get certificate errors and must update the local
crcbinary, and then reinstall the cluster.
With these limitations in mind, it is suggested that final testing of containers and operators developed in CodeReady Containers should occur in OpenShift Container Platform prior to certification.
You can continue installing CodeReady Containers locally by reading on, or you can reference the official documentation at https://code-ready.github.io/crc. If you use the instructions provided below, we'll assume your running on a Linux platform such as RHEL, CentOS or Fedora. You'll also need the
NetworkManager, libvirt and qemu-kvm packages installed on your system.The first step is to download a
crc release for your platform at https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/crc/latest/.The next step is to extract the
crc binary from the downloaded archive somewhere into your $PATH:$ tar -xJvf crc-linux-amd64.tar.xz -C $HOME/bin --strip-components=1 */crc
The
crc command should now be accessible from the command line. You can now install the cluster:$ crc setup
NOTE: You will need the image pull secret for your RHN account to complete the next step. See https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift/install/crc/installer-provisioned to obtain your pull secret.
Finally, start the cluster VM:
$ crc start
After a few moments, you should be given the login credentials and URL for the cluster and a message stating that CodeReady Containers is running. To access the cluster, download the latest oc client and extract into your
$PATH, or run the following shell command (which will last the duration of the shell session):$ eval $(crc oc-env)
You should now be able to login as
kubeadmin using the provided API URL and password. Keep in mind that you will have to run crc start again after a reboot to start the cluster. To test your operator, continue on to Deploying onto OpenShift.