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Creating a Windows machine set on GCP

You can create a Windows MachineSet object to serve a specific purpose in your OpenShift Container Platform cluster on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). For example, you might create infrastructure Windows machine sets and related machines so that you can move supporting Windows workloads to the new Windows machines.

Prerequisites

  • You installed the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) using Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM).

  • You are using a supported Windows Server as the operating system image.

Machine API overview

The Machine API is a combination of primary resources that are based on the upstream Cluster API project and custom OpenShift Container Platform resources.

For OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 clusters, the Machine API performs all node host provisioning management actions after the cluster installation finishes. Because of this system, OpenShift Container Platform 4.16 offers an elastic, dynamic provisioning method on top of public or private cloud infrastructure.

The two primary resources are:

Machines

A fundamental unit that describes the host for a node. A machine has a providerSpec specification, which describes the types of compute nodes that are offered for different cloud platforms. For example, a machine type for a compute node might define a specific machine type and required metadata.

Machine sets

MachineSet resources are groups of compute machines. Compute machine sets are to compute machines as replica sets are to pods. If you need more compute machines or must scale them down, you change the replicas field on the MachineSet resource to meet your compute need.

Control plane machines cannot be managed by compute machine sets.

Control plane machine sets provide management capabilities for supported control plane machines that are similar to what compute machine sets provide for compute machines.

For more information, see “Managing control plane machines".

The following custom resources add more capabilities to your cluster:

Machine autoscaler

The MachineAutoscaler resource automatically scales compute machines in a cloud. You can set the minimum and maximum scaling boundaries for nodes in a specified compute machine set, and the machine autoscaler maintains that range of nodes.

The MachineAutoscaler object takes effect after a ClusterAutoscaler object exists. Both ClusterAutoscaler and MachineAutoscaler resources are made available by the ClusterAutoscalerOperator object.

Cluster autoscaler

This resource is based on the upstream cluster autoscaler project. In the OpenShift Container Platform implementation, it is integrated with the Machine API by extending the compute machine set API. You can use the cluster autoscaler to manage your cluster in the following ways:

  • Set cluster-wide scaling limits for resources such as cores, nodes, memory, and GPU

  • Set the priority so that the cluster prioritizes pods and new nodes are not brought online for less important pods

  • Set the scaling policy so that you can scale up nodes but not scale them down

Machine health check

The MachineHealthCheck resource detects when a machine is unhealthy, deletes it, and, on supported platforms, makes a new machine.

In OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11, you could not roll out a multi-zone architecture easily because the cluster did not manage machine provisioning. Beginning with OpenShift Container Platform version 4.1, this process is easier. Each compute machine set is scoped to a single zone, so the installation program sends out compute machine sets across availability zones on your behalf. And then because your compute is dynamic, and in the face of a zone failure, you always have a zone for when you must rebalance your machines. In global Azure regions that do not have multiple availability zones, you can use availability sets to ensure high availability. The autoscaler provides best-effort balancing over the life of a cluster.

Sample YAML for a Windows MachineSet object on GCP

This sample YAML file defines a Windows MachineSet object running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) can use.

apiVersion: machine.openshift.io/v1beta1
kind: MachineSet
metadata:
  labels:
    machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id> (1)
  name: <infrastructure_id>-windows-worker-<zone_suffix> (2)
  namespace: openshift-machine-api
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id> (1)
      machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machineset: <infrastructure_id>-windows-worker-<zone_suffix> (2)
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id> (1)
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machine-role: worker
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machine-type: worker
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machineset: <infrastructure_id>-windows-worker-<zone_suffix> (2)
        machine.openshift.io/os-id: Windows (3)
    spec:
      metadata:
        labels:
          node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: "" (4)
      providerSpec:
        value:
          apiVersion: machine.openshift.io/v1beta1
          canIPForward: false
          credentialsSecret:
            name: gcp-cloud-credentials
          deletionProtection: false
          disks:
          - autoDelete: true
            boot: true
            image: <windows_server_image> (5)
            sizeGb: 128
            type: pd-ssd
          kind: GCPMachineProviderSpec
          machineType: n1-standard-4
          networkInterfaces:
          - network: <infrastructure_id>-network (1)
            subnetwork: <infrastructure_id>-worker-subnet
          projectID: <project_id> (6)
          region: <region> (7)
          serviceAccounts:
          - email: <infrastructure_id>-w@<project_id>.iam.gserviceaccount.com
            scopes:
            - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform
          tags:
          - <infrastructure_id>-worker
          userDataSecret:
            name: windows-user-data (8)
          zone: <zone> (9)
1 Specify the infrastructure ID that is based on the cluster ID that you set when you provisioned the cluster. You can obtain the infrastructure ID by running the following command: 
$ oc get -o jsonpath='{.status.infrastructureName}{"\n"}' infrastructure cluster
2 Specify the infrastructure ID, worker label, and zone suffix (such as a).
3 Configure the machine set as a Windows machine.
4 Configure the Windows node as a compute machine.
5 Specify the full path to an image of a supported version of Windows Server.
6 Specify the GCP project that this cluster was created in.
7 Specify the GCP region, such as us-central1.
8 Created by the WMCO when it configures the first Windows machine. After that, the windows-user-data is available for all subsequent machine sets to consume.
9 Specify the zone within the chosen region, such as us-central1-a.

Creating a compute machine set

In addition to the compute machine sets created by the installation program, you can create your own to dynamically manage the machine compute resources for specific workloads of your choice.

Prerequisites

  • Deploy an OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

  • Install the OpenShift CLI (oc).

  • Log in to oc as a user with cluster-admin permission.

Procedure

  1. Create a new YAML file that contains the compute machine set custom resource (CR) sample and is named <file_name>.yaml.

    Ensure that you set the <clusterID> and <role> parameter values.

  2. Optional: If you are not sure which value to set for a specific field, you can check an existing compute machine set from your cluster.

    1. To list the compute machine sets in your cluster, run the following command:

      $ oc get machinesets -n openshift-machine-api
      Example output
      NAME                                DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AVAILABLE   AGE
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1a   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1b   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1c   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1d   0         0                             55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1e   0         0                             55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1f   0         0                             55m

    2. To view values of a specific compute machine set custom resource (CR), run the following command:

      $ oc get machineset <machineset_name> \
  -n openshift-machine-api -o yaml
      Example output
      apiVersion: machine.openshift.io/v1beta1
kind: MachineSet
metadata:
  labels:
    machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id> (1)
  name: <infrastructure_id>-<role> (2)
  namespace: openshift-machine-api
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id>
      machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machineset: <infrastructure_id>-<role>
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-cluster: <infrastructure_id>
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machine-role: <role>
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machine-type: <role>
        machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-machineset: <infrastructure_id>-<role>
    spec:
      providerSpec: (3)
        ...
      1 The cluster infrastructure ID.
      2 A default node label.

      For clusters that have user-provisioned infrastructure, a compute machine set can only create worker and infra type machines.
      3 The values in the <providerSpec> section of the compute machine set CR are platform-specific. For more information about <providerSpec> parameters in the CR, see the sample compute machine set CR configuration for your provider.

  3. Create a MachineSet CR by running the following command:

    $ oc create -f <file_name>.yaml
Verification

  • View the list of compute machine sets by running the following command:

    $ oc get machineset -n openshift-machine-api
    Example output
    NAME                                DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AVAILABLE   AGE
agl030519-vplxk-infra-us-east-1a    1         1         1       1           11m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1a   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1b   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1c   1         1         1       1           55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1d   0         0                             55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1e   0         0                             55m
agl030519-vplxk-worker-us-east-1f   0         0                             55m

    When the new compute machine set is available, the DESIRED and CURRENT values match. If the compute machine set is not available, wait a few minutes and run the command again.

Additional resources