Adding compute machines to bare metal

You can add more compute machines to your OKD cluster on bare metal.

Prerequisites

  • You installed a cluster on bare metal.

  • You have installation media and Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) images that you used to create your cluster. If you do not have these files, you must obtain them by following the instructions in the installation procedure.

  • If a DHCP server is available for your user-provisioned infrastructure, you have added the details for the additional compute machines to your DHCP server configuration. This includes a persistent IP address, DNS server information, and a hostname for each machine.

  • You have updated your DNS configuration to include the record name and IP address of each compute machine that you are adding. You have validated that DNS lookup and reverse DNS lookup resolve correctly.

If you do not have access to the Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) images that were used to create your cluster, you can add more compute machines to your OKD cluster with newer versions of Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) images. For instructions, see Adding new nodes to UPI cluster fails after upgrading to OpenShift 4.6+.

Creating Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) machines

Before you add more compute machines to a cluster that you installed on bare metal infrastructure, you must create FCOS machines for it to use. You can either use an ISO image or network PXE booting to create the machines.

You must use the same ISO image that you used to install a cluster to deploy all new nodes in a cluster. It is recommended to use the same Ignition config file. The nodes automatically upgrade themselves on the first boot before running the workloads. You can add the nodes before or after the upgrade.

Creating more FCOS machines using an ISO image

You can create more Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) compute machines for your bare metal cluster by using an ISO image to create the machines.

Prerequisites

  • Obtain the URL of the Ignition config file for the compute machines for your cluster. You uploaded this file to your HTTP server during installation.

Procedure

  1. Use the ISO file to install FCOS on more compute machines. Use the same method that you used when you created machines before you installed the cluster:

    • Burn the ISO image to a disk and boot it directly.

    • Use ISO redirection with a LOM interface.

  2. After the instance boots, press the TAB or E key to edit the kernel command line.

  3. Add the parameters to the kernel command line:

    1. coreos.inst.install_dev=sda (1)
    2. coreos.inst.ignition_url=http://example.com/worker.ign (2)
    1Specify the block device of the system to install to.
    2Specify the URL of the compute Ignition config file. Only HTTP and HTTPS protocols are supported.

  4. Press Enter to complete the installation. After FCOS installs, the system reboots. After the system reboots, it applies the Ignition config file that you specified.

  5. Continue to create more compute machines for your cluster.

Creating more FCOS machines by PXE or iPXE booting

You can create more Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) compute machines for your bare metal cluster by using PXE or iPXE booting.

Prerequisites

  • Obtain the URL of the Ignition config file for the compute machines for your cluster. You uploaded this file to your HTTP server during installation.

  • Obtain the URLs of the FCOS ISO image, compressed metal BIOS, kernel, and initramfs files that you uploaded to your HTTP server during cluster installation.

  • You have access to the PXE booting infrastructure that you used to create the machines for your OKD cluster during installation. The machines must boot from their local disks after FCOS is installed on them.

  • If you use UEFI, you have access to the grub.conf file that you modified during OKD installation.

Procedure

  1. Confirm that your PXE or iPXE installation for the FCOS images is correct.

    • For PXE:

      1. DEFAULT pxeboot
      2. TIMEOUT 20
      3. PROMPT 0
      4. LABEL pxeboot
      5.     KERNEL http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-kernel-<architecture> (1)
      6.     APPEND initrd=http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-initramfs.<architecture>.img coreos.inst.install_dev=/dev/sda coreos.inst.ignition_url=http://<HTTP_server>/worker.ign coreos.live.rootfs_url=http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-rootfs.<architecture>.img (2)
      1Specify the location of the live kernel file that you uploaded to your HTTP server.
      2Specify locations of the FCOS files that you uploaded to your HTTP server. The initrd parameter value is the location of the live initramfs file, the coreos.inst.ignition_url parameter value is the location of the worker Ignition config file, and the coreos.live.rootfs_url parameter value is the location of the live rootfs file. The coreos.inst.ignition_url and coreos.live.rootfs_url parameters only support HTTP and HTTPS.

This configuration does not enable serial console access on machines with a graphical console. To configure a different console, add one or more console= arguments to the APPEND line. For example, add console=tty0 console=ttyS0 to set the first PC serial port as the primary console and the graphical console as a secondary console. For more information, see How does one set up a serial terminal and/or console in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?.

  • For iPXE:

    1. kernel http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-kernel-<architecture> initrd=main coreos.inst.install_dev=/dev/sda coreos.inst.ignition_url=http://<HTTP_server>/worker.ign coreos.live.rootfs_url=http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-rootfs.<architecture>.img (1)
    2. initrd --name main http://<HTTP_server>/rhcos-<version>-live-initramfs.<architecture>.img (2)
    1Specify locations of the FCOS files that you uploaded to your HTTP server. The kernel parameter value is the location of the kernel file, the initrd=main argument is needed for booting on UEFI systems, the coreos.inst.ignition_url parameter value is the location of the worker Ignition config file, and the coreos.live.rootfs_url parameter value is the location of the live rootfs file. The coreos.inst.ignition_url and coreos.live.rootfs_url parameters only support HTTP and HTTPS.
    2Specify the location of the initramfs file that you uploaded to your HTTP server.

This configuration does not enable serial console access on machines with a graphical console. To configure a different console, add one or more console= arguments to the kernel line. For example, add console=tty0 console=ttyS0 to set the first PC serial port as the primary console and the graphical console as a secondary console. For more information, see How does one set up a serial terminal and/or console in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?.

  1. Use the PXE or iPXE infrastructure to create the required compute machines for your cluster.

Approving the certificate signing requests for your machines

When you add machines to a cluster, two pending certificate signing requests (CSRs) are generated for each machine that you added. You must confirm that these CSRs are approved or, if necessary, approve them yourself. The client requests must be approved first, followed by the server requests.

Prerequisites

  • You added machines to your cluster.

Procedure

  1. Confirm that the cluster recognizes the machines:

    1. $ oc get nodes

    Example output

    1. NAME      STATUS    ROLES   AGE  VERSION
    2. master-0  Ready     master  63m  v1.24.0
    3. master-1  Ready     master  63m  v1.24.0
    4. master-2  Ready     master  64m  v1.24.0

    The output lists all of the machines that you created.

    The preceding output might not include the compute nodes, also known as worker nodes, until some CSRs are approved.

  2. Review the pending CSRs and ensure that you see the client requests with the Pending or Approved status for each machine that you added to the cluster:

    1. $ oc get csr

    Example output

    1. NAME        AGE     REQUESTOR                                                                   CONDITION
    2. csr-8b2br   15m     system:serviceaccount:openshift-machine-config-operator:node-bootstrapper   Pending
    3. csr-8vnps   15m     system:serviceaccount:openshift-machine-config-operator:node-bootstrapper   Pending
    4. ...

    In this example, two machines are joining the cluster. You might see more approved CSRs in the list.

  3. If the CSRs were not approved, after all of the pending CSRs for the machines you added are in Pending status, approve the CSRs for your cluster machines:

    Because the CSRs rotate automatically, approve your CSRs within an hour of adding the machines to the cluster. If you do not approve them within an hour, the certificates will rotate, and more than two certificates will be present for each node. You must approve all of these certificates. After the client CSR is approved, the Kubelet creates a secondary CSR for the serving certificate, which requires manual approval. Then, subsequent serving certificate renewal requests are automatically approved by the machine-approver if the Kubelet requests a new certificate with identical parameters.

    For clusters running on platforms that are not machine API enabled, such as bare metal and other user-provisioned infrastructure, you must implement a method of automatically approving the kubelet serving certificate requests (CSRs). If a request is not approved, then the oc exec, oc rsh, and oc logs commands cannot succeed, because a serving certificate is required when the API server connects to the kubelet. Any operation that contacts the Kubelet endpoint requires this certificate approval to be in place. The method must watch for new CSRs, confirm that the CSR was submitted by the node-bootstrapper service account in the system:node or system:admin groups, and confirm the identity of the node.

    • To approve them individually, run the following command for each valid CSR:

      1. $ oc adm certificate approve <csr_name> (1)
      1<csr_name> is the name of a CSR from the list of current CSRs.

    • To approve all pending CSRs, run the following command:

      1. $ oc get csr -o go-template='{{range .items}}{{if not .status}}{{.metadata.name}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}{{end}}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty oc adm certificate approve

      Some Operators might not become available until some CSRs are approved.

  4. Now that your client requests are approved, you must review the server requests for each machine that you added to the cluster:

    1. $ oc get csr

    Example output

    1. NAME        AGE     REQUESTOR                                                                   CONDITION
    2. csr-bfd72   5m26s   system:node:ip-10-0-50-126.us-east-2.compute.internal                       Pending
    3. csr-c57lv   5m26s   system:node:ip-10-0-95-157.us-east-2.compute.internal                       Pending
    4. ...

  5. If the remaining CSRs are not approved, and are in the Pending status, approve the CSRs for your cluster machines:

    • To approve them individually, run the following command for each valid CSR:

      1. $ oc adm certificate approve <csr_name> (1)
      1<csr_name> is the name of a CSR from the list of current CSRs.

    • To approve all pending CSRs, run the following command:

      1. $ oc get csr -o go-template='{{range .items}}{{if not .status}}{{.metadata.name}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}{{end}}' | xargs oc adm certificate approve

  6. After all client and server CSRs have been approved, the machines have the Ready status. Verify this by running the following command:

    1. $ oc get nodes

    Example output

    1. NAME      STATUS    ROLES   AGE  VERSION
    2. master-0  Ready     master  73m  v1.24.0
    3. master-1  Ready     master  73m  v1.24.0
    4. master-2  Ready     master  74m  v1.24.0
    5. worker-0  Ready     worker  11m  v1.24.0
    6. worker-1  Ready     worker  11m  v1.24.0

    It can take a few minutes after approval of the server CSRs for the machines to transition to the Ready status.

Additional information