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Installing a cluster on GCP in a restricted network with user-provisioned infrastructure

In OpenShift Container Platform version 4.10, you can install a cluster on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that uses infrastructure that you provide and an internal mirror of the installation release content.

While you can install an OpenShift Container Platform cluster by using mirrored installation release content, your cluster still requires internet access to use the GCP APIs.

The steps for performing a user-provided infrastructure install are outlined here. Several Deployment Manager templates are provided to assist in completing these steps or to help model your own. You are also free to create the required resources through other methods.

The steps for performing a user-provisioned infrastructure installation are provided as an example only. Installing a cluster with infrastructure you provide requires knowledge of the cloud provider and the installation process of OpenShift Container Platform. Several Deployment Manager templates are provided to assist in completing these steps or to help model your own. You are also free to create the required resources through other methods; the templates are just an example.

Prerequisites

About installations in restricted networks

In OpenShift Container Platform 4.10, you can perform an installation that does not require an active connection to the internet to obtain software components. Restricted network installations can be completed using installer-provisioned infrastructure or user-provisioned infrastructure, depending on the cloud platform to which you are installing the cluster.

If you choose to perform a restricted network installation on a cloud platform, you still require access to its cloud APIs. Some cloud functions, like Amazon Web Service’s Route 53 DNS and IAM services, require internet access. Depending on your network, you might require less internet access for an installation on bare metal hardware or on VMware vSphere.

To complete a restricted network installation, you must create a registry that mirrors the contents of the OpenShift Container Platform registry and contains the installation media. You can create this registry on a mirror host, which can access both the internet and your closed network, or by using other methods that meet your restrictions.

Because of the complexity of the configuration for user-provisioned installations, consider completing a standard user-provisioned infrastructure installation before you attempt a restricted network installation using user-provisioned infrastructure. Completing this test installation might make it easier to isolate and troubleshoot any issues that might arise during your installation in a restricted network.

Additional limits

Clusters in restricted networks have the following additional limitations and restrictions:

  • The ClusterVersion status includes an Unable to retrieve available updates error.

  • By default, you cannot use the contents of the Developer Catalog because you cannot access the required image stream tags.

Internet access for OpenShift Container Platform

In OpenShift Container Platform 4.10, you require access to the internet to obtain the images that are necessary to install your cluster.

You must have internet access to:

  • Access OpenShift Cluster Manager to download the installation program and perform subscription management. If the cluster has internet access and you do not disable Telemetry, that service automatically entitles your cluster.

  • Access Quay.io to obtain the packages that are required to install your cluster.

  • Obtain the packages that are required to perform cluster updates.

If your cluster cannot have direct internet access, you can perform a restricted network installation on some types of infrastructure that you provision. During that process, you download the required content and use it to populate a mirror registry with the installation packages. With some installation types, the environment that you install your cluster in will not require internet access. Before you update the cluster, you update the content of the mirror registry.

Configuring your GCP project

Before you can install OpenShift Container Platform, you must configure a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project to host it.

Creating a GCP project

To install OpenShift Container Platform, you must create a project in your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account to host the cluster.

Procedure

  • Create a project to host your OpenShift Container Platform cluster. See Creating and Managing Projects in the GCP documentation.

    Your GCP project must use the Premium Network Service Tier if you are using installer-provisioned infrastructure. The Standard Network Service Tier is not supported for clusters installed using the installation program. The installation program configures internal load balancing for the api-int.<cluster_name>.<base_domain> URL; the Premium Tier is required for internal load balancing.

Enabling API services in GCP

Your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project requires access to several API services to complete OpenShift Container Platform installation.

Prerequisites

  • You created a project to host your cluster.

Procedure

  • Enable the following required API services in the project that hosts your cluster. See Enabling services in the GCP documentation.

    Table 1. Required API services
    API service Console service name

    Compute Engine API

    compute.googleapis.com

    Google Cloud APIs

    cloudapis.googleapis.com

    Cloud Resource Manager API

    cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com

    Google DNS API

    dns.googleapis.com

    IAM Service Account Credentials API

    iamcredentials.googleapis.com

    Identity and Access Management (IAM) API

    iam.googleapis.com

    Service Management API

    servicemanagement.googleapis.com

    Service Usage API

    serviceusage.googleapis.com

    Google Cloud Storage JSON API

    storage-api.googleapis.com

    Cloud Storage

    storage-component.googleapis.com

Configuring DNS for GCP

To install OpenShift Container Platform, the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account you use must have a dedicated public hosted zone in the same project that you host the OpenShift Container Platform cluster. This zone must be authoritative for the domain. The DNS service provides cluster DNS resolution and name lookup for external connections to the cluster.

Procedure

  1. Identify your domain, or subdomain, and registrar. You can transfer an existing domain and registrar or obtain a new one through GCP or another source.

    If you purchase a new domain, it can take time for the relevant DNS changes to propagate. For more information about purchasing domains through Google, see Google Domains.

  2. Create a public hosted zone for your domain or subdomain in your GCP project. See Creating public zones in the GCP documentation.

    Use an appropriate root domain, such as openshiftcorp.com, or subdomain, such as clusters.openshiftcorp.com.

  3. Extract the new authoritative name servers from the hosted zone records. See Look up your Cloud DNS name servers in the GCP documentation.

    You typically have four name servers.

  4. Update the registrar records for the name servers that your domain uses. For example, if you registered your domain to Google Domains, see the following topic in the Google Domains Help: How to switch to custom name servers.

  5. If you migrated your root domain to Google Cloud DNS, migrate your DNS records. See Migrating to Cloud DNS in the GCP documentation.

  6. If you use a subdomain, follow your company’s procedures to add its delegation records to the parent domain. This process might include a request to your company’s IT department or the division that controls the root domain and DNS services for your company.

GCP account limits

The OpenShift Container Platform cluster uses a number of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) components, but the default Quotas do not affect your ability to install a default OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

A default cluster, which contains three compute and three control plane machines, uses the following resources. Note that some resources are required only during the bootstrap process and are removed after the cluster deploys.

Table 2. GCP resources used in a default cluster
Service Component Location Total resources required Resources removed after bootstrap

Service account

IAM

Global

5

0

Firewall rules

Networking

Global

11

1

Forwarding rules

Compute

Global

2

0

Health checks

Compute

Global

2

0

Images

Compute

Global

1

0

Networks

Networking

Global

1

0

Routers

Networking

Global

1

0

Routes

Networking

Global

2

0

Subnetworks

Compute

Global

2

0

Target pools

Networking

Global

2

0

If any of the quotas are insufficient during installation, the installation program displays an error that states both which quota was exceeded and the region.

Be sure to consider your actual cluster size, planned cluster growth, and any usage from other clusters that are associated with your account. The CPU, static IP addresses, and persistent disk SSD (storage) quotas are the ones that are most likely to be insufficient.

If you plan to deploy your cluster in one of the following regions, you will exceed the maximum storage quota and are likely to exceed the CPU quota limit:

  • asia-east2

  • asia-northeast2

  • asia-south1

  • australia-southeast1

  • europe-north1

  • europe-west2

  • europe-west3

  • europe-west6

  • northamerica-northeast1

  • southamerica-east1

  • us-west2

You can increase resource quotas from the GCP console, but you might need to file a support ticket. Be sure to plan your cluster size early so that you can allow time to resolve the support ticket before you install your OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

Creating a service account in GCP

OpenShift Container Platform requires a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service account that provides authentication and authorization to access data in the Google APIs. If you do not have an existing IAM service account that contains the required roles in your project, you must create one.

Prerequisites

  • You created a project to host your cluster.

Procedure

  1. Create a service account in the project that you use to host your OpenShift Container Platform cluster. See Creating a service account in the GCP documentation.

  2. Grant the service account the appropriate permissions. You can either grant the individual permissions that follow or assign the Owner role to it. See Granting roles to a service account for specific resources.

    While making the service account an owner of the project is the easiest way to gain the required permissions, it means that service account has complete control over the project. You must determine if the risk that comes from offering that power is acceptable.

  3. Create the service account key in JSON format. See Creating service account keys in the GCP documentation.

    The service account key is required to create a cluster.

Required GCP permissions

When you attach the Owner role to the service account that you create, you grant that service account all permissions, including those that are required to install OpenShift Container Platform. To deploy an OpenShift Container Platform cluster, the service account requires the following permissions. If you deploy your cluster into an existing VPC, the service account does not require certain networking permissions, which are noted in the following lists:

Required roles for the installation program

  • Compute Admin

  • Security Admin

  • Service Account Admin

  • Service Account User

  • Storage Admin

Required roles for creating network resources during installation

  • DNS Administrator

Required roles for user-provisioned GCP infrastructure

  • Deployment Manager Editor

  • Service Account Key Admin

Optional roles

For the cluster to create new limited credentials for its Operators, add the following role:

  • Service Account Key Admin

The roles are applied to the service accounts that the control plane and compute machines use:

Table 3. GCP service account permissions
Account Roles

Control Plane

roles/compute.instanceAdmin

roles/compute.networkAdmin

roles/compute.securityAdmin

roles/storage.admin

roles/iam.serviceAccountUser

Compute

roles/compute.viewer

roles/storage.admin

Supported GCP regions

You can deploy an OpenShift Container Platform cluster to the following Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions:

  • asia-east1 (Changhua County, Taiwan)

  • asia-east2 (Hong Kong)

  • asia-northeast1 (Tokyo, Japan)

  • asia-northeast2 (Osaka, Japan)

  • asia-northeast3 (Seoul, South Korea)

  • asia-south1 (Mumbai, India)

  • asia-south2 (Delhi, India)

  • asia-southeast1 (Jurong West, Singapore)

  • asia-southeast2 (Jakarta, Indonesia)

  • australia-southeast1 (Sydney, Australia)

  • australia-southeast2 (Melbourne, Australia)

  • europe-central2 (Warsaw, Poland)

  • europe-north1 (Hamina, Finland)

  • europe-southwest1 (Madrid, Spain)

  • europe-west1 (St. Ghislain, Belgium)

  • europe-west2 (London, England, UK)

  • europe-west3 (Frankfurt, Germany)

  • europe-west4 (Eemshaven, Netherlands)

  • europe-west6 (Zürich, Switzerland)

  • europe-west8 (Milan, Italy)

  • europe-west9 (Paris, France)

  • northamerica-northeast1 (Montréal, Québec, Canada)

  • northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

  • southamerica-east1 (São Paulo, Brazil)

  • southamerica-west1 (Santiago, Chile)

  • us-central1 (Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA)

  • us-east1 (Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA)

  • us-east4 (Ashburn, Northern Virginia, USA)

  • us-east5 (Columbus, Ohio)

  • us-south1 (Dallas, Texas)

  • us-west1 (The Dalles, Oregon, USA)

  • us-west2 (Los Angeles, California, USA)

  • us-west3 (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)

  • us-west4 (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA)

Installing and configuring CLI tools for GCP

To install OpenShift Container Platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using user-provisioned infrastructure, you must install and configure the CLI tools for GCP.

Prerequisites

  • You created a project to host your cluster.

  • You created a service account and granted it the required permissions.

Procedure

  1. Install the following binaries in $PATH:

    • gcloud

    • gsutil

    See Install the latest Cloud SDK version in the GCP documentation.

  2. Authenticate using the gcloud tool with your configured service account.

    See Authorizing with a service account in the GCP documentation.

Requirements for a cluster with user-provisioned infrastructure

For a cluster that contains user-provisioned infrastructure, you must deploy all of the required machines.

This section describes the requirements for deploying OpenShift Container Platform on user-provisioned infrastructure.

Required machines for cluster installation

The smallest OpenShift Container Platform clusters require the following hosts:

Table 4. Minimum required hosts
Hosts Description

One temporary bootstrap machine

The cluster requires the bootstrap machine to deploy the OpenShift Container Platform cluster on the three control plane machines. You can remove the bootstrap machine after you install the cluster.

Three control plane machines

The control plane machines run the Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform services that form the control plane.

At least two compute machines, which are also known as worker machines.

The workloads requested by OpenShift Container Platform users run on the compute machines.

To maintain high availability of your cluster, use separate physical hosts for these cluster machines.

The bootstrap and control plane machines must use Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) as the operating system. However, the compute machines can choose between Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4, or RHEL 8.5.

Note that RHCOS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and inherits all of its hardware certifications and requirements. See Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology capabilities and limits.

Minimum resource requirements for cluster installation

Each cluster machine must meet the following minimum requirements:

Table 5. Minimum resource requirements
Machine Operating System vCPU [1] Virtual RAM Storage IOPS [2]

Bootstrap

RHCOS

4

16 GB

100 GB

300

Control plane

RHCOS

4

16 GB

100 GB

300

Compute

RHCOS, RHEL 8.4, or RHEL 8.5 [3]

2

8 GB

100 GB

300

  1. One vCPU is equivalent to one physical core when simultaneous multithreading (SMT), or hyperthreading, is not enabled. When enabled, use the following formula to calculate the corresponding ratio: (threads per core × cores) × sockets = vCPUs.

  2. OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes are sensitive to disk performance, and faster storage is recommended, particularly for etcd on the control plane nodes which require a 10 ms p99 fsync duration. Note that on many cloud platforms, storage size and IOPS scale together, so you might need to over-allocate storage volume to obtain sufficient performance.

  3. As with all user-provisioned installations, if you choose to use RHEL compute machines in your cluster, you take responsibility for all operating system life cycle management and maintenance, including performing system updates, applying patches, and completing all other required tasks. Use of RHEL 7 compute machines is deprecated and has been removed in OpenShift Container Platform 4.10 and later.

If an instance type for your platform meets the minimum requirements for cluster machines, it is supported to use in OpenShift Container Platform.

Tested instance types for GCP

The following Google Cloud Platform instance types have been tested with OpenShift Container Platform.

Machine series

  • C2

  • E2

  • M1

  • N1

  • N2

  • N2D

  • Tau T2D

Creating the installation files for GCP

To install OpenShift Container Platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using user-provisioned infrastructure, you must generate the files that the installation program needs to deploy your cluster and modify them so that the cluster creates only the machines that it will use. You generate and customize the install-config.yaml file, Kubernetes manifests, and Ignition config files. You also have the option to first set up a separate var partition during the preparation phases of installation.

Optional: Creating a separate /var partition

It is recommended that disk partitioning for OpenShift Container Platform be left to the installer. However, there are cases where you might want to create separate partitions in a part of the filesystem that you expect to grow.

OpenShift Container Platform supports the addition of a single partition to attach storage to either the /var partition or a subdirectory of /var. For example:

  • /var/lib/containers: Holds container-related content that can grow as more images and containers are added to a system.

  • /var/lib/etcd: Holds data that you might want to keep separate for purposes such as performance optimization of etcd storage.

  • /var: Holds data that you might want to keep separate for purposes such as auditing.

Storing the contents of a /var directory separately makes it easier to grow storage for those areas as needed and reinstall OpenShift Container Platform at a later date and keep that data intact. With this method, you will not have to pull all your containers again, nor will you have to copy massive log files when you update systems.

Because /var must be in place before a fresh installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), the following procedure sets up the separate /var partition by creating a machine config manifest that is inserted during the openshift-install preparation phases of an OpenShift Container Platform installation.

If you follow the steps to create a separate /var partition in this procedure, it is not necessary to create the Kubernetes manifest and Ignition config files again as described later in this section.
Procedure

  1. Create a directory to hold the OpenShift Container Platform installation files:

    $ mkdir $HOME/clusterconfig

  2. Run openshift-install to create a set of files in the manifest and openshift subdirectories. Answer the system questions as you are prompted:

    $ openshift-install create manifests --dir $HOME/clusterconfig
    Example output
    ? SSH Public Key ...
INFO Credentials loaded from the "myprofile" profile in file "/home/myuser/.aws/credentials"
INFO Consuming Install Config from target directory
INFO Manifests created in: $HOME/clusterconfig/manifests and $HOME/clusterconfig/openshift

  3. Optional: Confirm that the installation program created manifests in the clusterconfig/openshift directory:

    $ ls $HOME/clusterconfig/openshift/
    Example output
    99_kubeadmin-password-secret.yaml
99_openshift-cluster-api_master-machines-0.yaml
99_openshift-cluster-api_master-machines-1.yaml
99_openshift-cluster-api_master-machines-2.yaml
...

  4. Create a Butane config that configures the additional partition. For example, name the file $HOME/clusterconfig/98-var-partition.bu, change the disk device name to the name of the storage device on the worker systems, and set the storage size as appropriate. This example places the /var directory on a separate partition:

    variant: openshift
version: 4.10.0
metadata:
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
  name: 98-var-partition
storage:
  disks:
  - device: /dev/<device_name> (1)
    partitions:
    - label: var
      start_mib: <partition_start_offset> (2)
      size_mib: <partition_size> (3)
  filesystems:
    - device: /dev/disk/by-partlabel/var
      path: /var
      format: xfs
      mount_options: [defaults, prjquota] (4)
      with_mount_unit: true
    1 The storage device name of the disk that you want to partition.
    2 When adding a data partition to the boot disk, a minimum value of 25000 MiB (Mebibytes) is recommended. The root file system is automatically resized to fill all available space up to the specified offset. If no value is specified, or if the specified value is smaller than the recommended minimum, the resulting root file system will be too small, and future reinstalls of RHCOS might overwrite the beginning of the data partition.
    3 The size of the data partition in mebibytes.
    4 The prjquota mount option must be enabled for filesystems used for container storage.

    When creating a separate /var partition, you cannot use different instance types for worker nodes, if the different instance types do not have the same device name.

  5. Create a manifest from the Butane config and save it to the clusterconfig/openshift directory. For example, run the following command:

    $ butane $HOME/clusterconfig/98-var-partition.bu -o $HOME/clusterconfig/openshift/98-var-partition.yaml

  6. Run openshift-install again to create Ignition configs from a set of files in the manifest and openshift subdirectories:

    $ openshift-install create ignition-configs --dir $HOME/clusterconfig
$ ls $HOME/clusterconfig/
auth  bootstrap.ign  master.ign  metadata.json  worker.ign

Now you can use the Ignition config files as input to the installation procedures to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) systems.

Creating the installation configuration file

You can customize the OpenShift Container Platform cluster you install on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Prerequisites

  • Obtain the OpenShift Container Platform installation program and the pull secret for your cluster. For a restricted network installation, these files are on your mirror host.

  • Have the imageContentSources values that were generated during mirror registry creation.

  • Obtain the contents of the certificate for your mirror registry.

  • Obtain service principal permissions at the subscription level.

Procedure

  1. Create the install-config.yaml file.

    1. Change to the directory that contains the installation program and run the following command:

      $ ./openshift-install create install-config --dir <installation_directory> (1)
      1 For <installation_directory>, specify the directory name to store the files that the installation program creates.

      Specify an empty directory. Some installation assets, like bootstrap X.509 certificates have short expiration intervals, so you must not reuse an installation directory. If you want to reuse individual files from another cluster installation, you can copy them into your directory. However, the file names for the installation assets might change between releases. Use caution when copying installation files from an earlier OpenShift Container Platform version.

    2. At the prompts, provide the configuration details for your cloud:

      1. Optional: Select an SSH key to use to access your cluster machines.

        For production OpenShift Container Platform clusters on which you want to perform installation debugging or disaster recovery, specify an SSH key that your ssh-agent process uses.

      2. Select gcp as the platform to target.

      3. If you have not configured the service account key for your GCP account on your computer, you must obtain it from GCP and paste the contents of the file or enter the absolute path to the file.

      4. Select the project ID to provision the cluster in. The default value is specified by the service account that you configured.

      5. Select the region to deploy the cluster to.

      6. Select the base domain to deploy the cluster to. The base domain corresponds to the public DNS zone that you created for your cluster.

      7. Enter a descriptive name for your cluster.

      8. Paste the pull secret from the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager.

  2. Edit the install-config.yaml file to give the additional information that is required for an installation in a restricted network.

    1. Update the pullSecret value to contain the authentication information for your registry:

      pullSecret: '{"auths":{"<mirror_host_name>:5000": {"auth": "<credentials>","email": "you@example.com"}}}'

      For <mirror_host_name>, specify the registry domain name that you specified in the certificate for your mirro