Disclaimer

This environment has been created for the sole purpose of providing an easy to deploy and consume Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 environment as a sandpit.

This install will create a “Minimal Viable Setup”, which anyone can extend to their needs and purposes.

Recent tests show that SSD storage on the server might be required for any persistent deployment to work correctly.

Use it at your own pleasure and risk!

Release notes

Release notes

Contribution

If you want to provide additional features, please feel free to contribute via pull requests or any other means.

We are happy to track and discuss ideas, topics and requests via Issues.

Install Instructions

Our instructions are based on the CentOS Root Server as provided by Hetzner, please feel free to adapt it to the needs of your preferred hosting provider. We are happy to get pull requests for an updated documentation, which makes consuming this setup easy also for other hosting providers.

These instructions are for running CentOS and 'root' machines which are set up following the Hetzner CentOS documentation. You might have to modify commands if running on another Linux distro. Feel free to provide instructions for alternative providers.

NOTE: If you are running on other environments than bare metal servers from Hetzner, check if there is specific instruction under Infra providers list and then jump to section Initialize tools

Supported root server operating systems:

• RHEL 8 - How to install RHEL8: https://keithtenzer.com/cloud/how-to-create-a-rhel-8-image-for-hetzner-root-servers/
• RHEL 9 - leapp update from RHEL 8
• RHEL 9 (How to install RHEL9)
• CentOS Stream 9 base
• Rocky Linux 9.1 base
• Debian 11

Infra providers

• Hetzner CentOS

When following the steps below, you will end with a setup similar to this:

Strongly recommended: configure Hetzner Firewall

Important: Hetzner Firewall only support IPv4 - IPv6 must be solved via the host firewall(d)!

Here is an example Hetzner Firewall configuration:

In case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Subscribe your RHEL host:

subscription-manager register

# get pool id via:
# subscription-manager list --available
subscription-manager attach [--auto] --pool=...

subscription-manager repos --disable=*

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

subscription-manager repos \
    --enable=rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms \
    --enable=rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms \
    --enable=rhel-8-for-x86_64-highavailability-rpms \
    --enable=ansible-automation-platform-2.3-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

subscription-manager repos \
    --enable=rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms \
    --enable=rhel-9-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms \
    --enable=rhel-9-for-x86_64-highavailability-rpms \
    --enable=ansible-automation-platform-2.3-for-rhel-9-x86_64-rpms

dnf install -y ansible-navigator git podman

In case of Rocky Linux 8 or Centos 8

Ansible navigator installation based on the upstream documentation.

dnf install -y python3-pip podman git
python3 -m pip install ansible-navigator --user
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile

Initialize tools

ssh-keygen
cat ~/.ssh/*.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

You are now ready to clone this project to your CentOS system.

git clone https://github.com/RedHat-EMEA-SSA-Team/hetzner-ocp4.git

We are now ready to install libvirt as our hypervisor, provision VMs and prepare those for OCP.

Define variables for your cluster

Here is an example of a cluster.yml file that contains information about the cluster that is going to be installed. The parameters that can be configured are as follows:

Cluster design (single node, compact or normal)

It is possible to install three different types of cluster designs: single node, compact or normal.

Single Node

Recommended cluster.yml settings:

master_count: 1
compute_count: 0
masters_schedulable: true # is default
# It's recommended to increase the master capacity too
# master_vcpu: 4
# master_memory_size: 16384
# master_memory_unit: 'MiB'
# master_root_disk_size: '120G'

Compact

Recommended cluster.yml settings:

master_count: 3
compute_count: 0
masters_schedulable: true # is default

Normal

Recommended cluster.yml settings:

master_count: 3
compute_count: 2 # at least 2 recommended
masters_schedulable: false

Pre-releases

Read this if you want to deploy pre releases

Set up public DNS records

Current tools allow use of three DNS providers: AWS Route53, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, GCP DNS or none. If you want to use Route53, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, GCP or Gandi as your DNS provider, you have to add a few variables. Check the instructions below.

DNS records are constructed based on _clustername and _publicdomain values. With above values DNS records should be

• api._clustername._publicdomain
• *.apps._clustername._publicdomain

If you use another DNS provider, feel free to contribute! 😀

With dns_provider: none the playbooks will not create public dns entries. (It will skip letsencrypt too) Please create public dns entries if you want to access your cluster.

Please configure in cluster.yml all necessary credentials:

Optional configuration

Prepare kvm-host and install OpenShift

cd hetzner-ocp4
ansible-navigator run ansible/setup.yml

When using an Ansible-vault containing sensitive configuration data:

% ansible-vault create ansible/group_vars/all/my-vault.yml
% touch ~/.vault-password && chmod 0600 ~/.vault-password
% vi ~/.vault-password   # enter password as plain-text
% export ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=~/.vault-password
% ansible-navigator run ansible/setup.yml

Please note that group_vars and host_vars will have to reside in the directory of the playbook to be run. In our setup, this will be ansible/group_vars and ansible/host_vars.

Additional documentation

• How to use add-ons (post_install_add_ons)
• How to install and manage more than one OpenShift Cluster with hetzner-ocp4
• How to install an air-gapped cluster with hetzner-ocp4
• How to install an proxy cluster with hetzner-ocp4
• How to setup a container native virtualization lab (nested) with hetzner-ocp4
• How to install an OpenShift nighly or RC (any kind of pre-release)
• Disk management (add disk to vm, wipe node)
• How to passthrough nvme or gpu (pci-passthrough
• How to install OKD
• Virsh commands cheatsheet to manage KVM guest virtual machines
• Remote execution, run the playbooks on your laptop

Playbook overview

Useful commands

Build / Development

Build ansible execution enviorment

VERSION=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M)

ansible-builder build \
    --verbosity 3 \
    --container-runtime podman \
    --tag quay.io/redhat-emea-ssa-team/hetzner-ocp4-ansible-ee:$VERSION

podman push quay.io/redhat-emea-ssa-team/hetzner-ocp4-ansible-ee:$VERSION

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