Easy Openshift 4 Install on RHEL 8 Bare Metal with KVM and LIBVIRT

NOTICE *** This video is out of date. Use the new MUCH EASIER IPI installation methods for Openshift on various providers. I will keep this video up for posterity.

This video will walk you through all the gotchas while installing Openshift 4 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. I used the UPI (User Provisioned Infrastructure) mode with virtualization on bare metal machines. I use KVM and Libvirt for virtualization. Rather than pay a significant amount to use the cloud to kick the tires on Openshift 4, I finally pieced together the right approach to get Openshift 4 up and running with my own hardware.

Notes for following along in the video:

Github Libvirt tutorial

[Oswee]

Ouh man... 2 months ago i spend SOOOO much time to get this thing running in libvirt setup... glad you decided to make video on this. If some day i will get OBS not crashing on my Fedora, i will try to record my setup as well.

[zeenix]

You don't need to modify the source at all. You can simply ask openshift-install to wait longer with `openshift-install wait-for install-complete` after the timeout. Also, there are plenty of people who can get the installation to finish in 30 mins time, just that they've fast-enough machines. :)

[Oswee]

BTW - i made a mistake i wasted so much time on. I tried to install 3 masters, 2 infras and 3 compute nodes with Ansible script all at once. And every time i tried it i stuck with Authentication operator degraded and so Console as well. Everybody is telling that you can iPXE boot nodes in no order which is true, but nobody is telling that you should first install Masters and Infras only and only after bootsrap is done, you can install workers.
Anyway, now i have fully automated Ansible scripts to setup HA cluster.

[shikhakatoch]

@Dean Peterson, Can you share the baremetal hardware specification (RAM, CPU, Hard disk) and VMs specifications (vCPU, RAM, Hard Disk)

[tamarathomas]

Hi, and thanks for this tutorial. When running the 'lsmod | grep -i kvm' command on a Centos 7 machine at beginning of install (step 2), I get no output even though packages appear to be installed and at latest versions. Any ideas where I should be troubleshooting? Thanks

[ahmadkarim]

Good Work you have Done! Keep it up....

[nuruddinahmed]

Are you using only one server? Just like all-in-one installation? can i follow it for 3 master machines and 2 worker machines?

[Nimitz_oceo]

My only question is : what happens if you already have running VMs and then you change libivirtd.conf file configs. Wouldn’t that wrack havoc to an existing infrastructure?

[benkhemismarwen]

why should we delete the ethernet interface ?
thanks for the great video

[loveanimals-]

You said you'll show everything step-by-step and from the basics. Yet, you started with what looked like a running RHEL VM and you didn't mention what its hardware prerequisites were, or what that VM is used for, i.e. is it the bootstrap VM or the master or what?!

[kevjule]

Hi Dean. Thanks for the video. It is very useful. Can you describe how your lab machine was carved up before and after running the installer. I'm confused about what VM provisioning for the bootstrap, master, and worker is handled automatically by the installer, what VM provisioning you did manually, and what host the installer was executed on. Thanks.

[qizhang]

Thanks for sharing, Dean. By following your instructions, I set up a cluster with only 1 master node. How can I create a cluster with 3 master nodes?

[AnderOtxoa]

Have you tried to make the installation with current version? (4.4, downloading file is for some strange reason it stalls waiting for the installation to finish. No end after 12 hours in a Xeon with 32GB RAM :-(

[dewaynebranch]

Sup, I am trying to do the same thing as you