Getting started with Openshift v4 - part 2 - installing on vSphere

After successfull installation of Openshift v4 on AWS I had a opportunity to install Openshift v4 on vSphere. This time installation had to be done following User Provisioned Infrastructure procedure. This means before the cluster could be bootstrapped I had to prepare required infrastucture myself following the documentation. 

First thing you need to prepare is networking: 2 load balancers for masters and worker nodes and DNS configuration for your cluster.

Secondly you need to download and run openshift-install but this time only to generate your machines ignition config files. Don't forget to create install-config.yaml file first!

Last thing you need to do is to create virtual machines in your vSphere cluster. You'll need to download RHCOS OVA image and create 1 bootstrap, 3 masters and 3 worker machines.

Now you are almost done!

At this point I decided to slighty disobey documentation and boot seperately masters and worker nodes. In order to do that first I have started only bootstrap node and 3 master nodes and had to wait until bootstrap process has finished. This will take a while and you can either ssh to bootstrap machine and follow journal log, or call openshift-install with wait-for bootstrap-complete parameters to monitor bootstrap progress. 

To confirm master bootstrap is done you can call oc get nodes to verify if all 3 masters are in ready status.

$ oc get nodes

NAME      STATUS    ROLES   AGE  VERSION
master-0  Ready     master  63m  v1.13.4+b626c2fe1
master-1  Ready     master  63m  v1.13.4+b626c2fe1
master-2  Ready     master  64m  v1.13.4+b626c2fe1

At this point you should delete bootstrap virtual machine and remove it from the load balancer.

Now you can simply start worker nodes (one by one, or in pararel) and wait for a while until they'll appear in the nodes list with status ready by calling again oc get nodes command.

Next thing you'll need to do is to approve pending csrs for your worker machines.

Last but not least don't forget to configure storage for you image registry operator.

That's it. Your Openshift v4 cluster is up and running on vSphere!

In part 3 I'll show you how to proceed with cluster configuration.