This is a series of posts to demonstrate how to install OKD 3.11 on oVirt and what you can do with it.
Part I – How to install OKD 3.11 on oVirt

How to install OKD 3.11 on oVirt (4.2 and up)

Installing OKD or Kubernetes on oVirt has many advantages, and it’s also gotten a lot easier these days. Admins and users who want to take container platform management for a spin, on oVirt, will be encouraged by this.
Few of the advantages are:

  • Virtualizing the control plane for Kubernetes – provide HA/backup/affinity capabilities to the controllers and allowing hardware maintenance cycles
  • Providing persistent volume for containers via the IAAS, without the need for additional storage array dedicated to Kubernetes
  • Allowing a quick method to build up/tear down Kubernetes clusters, providing hard tenancy model via VMs between clusters.

The installation uses openshift-ansible and, specifically the openshift_ovirt ansible-role. The integration between OpenShift and oVirt is tighter, and provides storage integration. If you need persistent volumes for your containers you can get that directly from oVirt using ovirt-volume-provisioner and ovirt-flexvolume-driver.
For the sake of simplicity, this example will cover an all-in-one OpenShift cluster, on a single VM.
On top of that, in the 2nd post, we will run a classic web stack, a Java application with a simple REST-API endpoint + Postgres. Postgres will get a persistent volume from oVirt using its flexvolume driver.

Picture by Soroush golpoor on Unsplash

Single shell file installation

Dropping to shell – this install.sh is a wrapper for installing the ovirt-openshift-installer container, it uses ansible-playbook and has two main playbooks: install_okd.yaml and install_extensions.yaml. The latter is mainly for installing oVirt storage plugins.

The install.sh script has one dependency, it needs to have ‘podman’ installed on the host, while all the rest runs inside a container.

The only dependency (except from running oVirt datacenter) is podman:

[bastion ~]# dnf install podman

For other ways to install podman consult the readme

If you can’t install podman docker will be fine as well, just edit the install.sh, and substitute podman for docker.

Get the install.sh and customize

[bastion ~]# curl -O "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oVirt/ovirt-openshift-extensions/master/automation/ci/{install.sh,vars.yaml}"

Edit the vars.yaml:

  • Put the engine details in engine_url
    engine_url: https://ovirt-engine-fqdn/ovirt-engine/api
    
  • Choose the oVirt cluster and data domain you want, if you don’t want ‘Default’
    openshift_ovirt_cluster: yours
    openshift_ovirt_data_store: yours
    
  • Unmark to disable the memory and disks checks in case the VM memory is under 8Gb
    openshift_disable_check: memory_availability,disk_availability,docker_image_availability
    
  • Domain name of the setup. The setup will create a VM with the name master0.$public_hosted_zone here. This VM will
    be used for all the components of the setup

    public_hosted_zone: example.com
    

For a more complete list of customizations, take a look at the vars.yaml and the inventory file.

Install

Run install.sh to start the installation.

[bastion ~]# bash install.sh

install.sh automates the following steps:

  1. Pull the ovirt-openshift-installer container and run it.
  2. Download Centos Cloud Image and import it into oVirt based on the qcow_url variable.
  3. Create a VM named master0.example.com from the template above.The VM name is based on the public_hosted_zone variable.
  4. The cloud-init script will configure repositories, a network, ovirt-guest-agent, etc. based on the cloud_init_script_master variable.
  5. The VM will dynamically be inserted into an ansible inventory, under master, compute, and etc groups
  6. Openshift-ansible main playbooks are executed to install OKD: prerequisite.yml and deploy_cluster.yml

When the script finishes, an all-in-one cluster is installed and running. Let’s check it out.

[root@master0 ~]# oc get nodes
NAME                         STATUS    ROLES                  AGE       VERSION
master0.example.com   Ready     compute,infra,master   1h        v1.11.0+d4cacc0

Check oVirt’s extensions

[root@master0 ~]# oc get deploy/ovirt-volume-provisioner
NAME                       DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
ovirt-volume-provisioner   1         1         1            1           57m

[root@master0 ~]# oc get ds/ovirt-flexvolume-driver
NAME                      DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR   AGE
ovirt-flexvolume-driver   1         1         1         1            1           <none>          59m

Default Storage Class

To run all the dynamic storage provisioning through oVirt’s provisioner,
we need to set oVirt’s storage class to the default.
Notice that a storage class defines which oVirt storage domain will
be used to provision the disks. Also it will set the disk type (thin/thick) provision to be the default, thin.

[root@master ~]# oc patch sc/ovirt  
                    -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"true"}}}'

Connect to OKD web console

You can now connect to the web console, and keep manage your cluster from there. To do so
first make sure you can resolve master0.example.com (substitute example.com with whatever
is set in public_hosted_zone customization variable, as mentioned above.)

Browse to https://master0.example.com:8443 and login with whatever user/password you want:

Summary

This blog post covered the installation of OKD on an oVirt VM. If you followed the step you now have
an all-in-one cluster with dynamic storage provisioning from oVirt storage.
In the next post I’m going deploy Postgres DB in a container with persistent volume from oVirt
storage domain.