Installing a cluster on GCP into a shared VPC

In OKD version 4.12, you can install a cluster into a shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In this installation method, the cluster is configured to use a VPC from a different GCP project. A shared VPC enables an organization to connect resources from multiple projects to a common VPC network. You can communicate within the organization securely and efficiently by using internal IP addresses from that network. For more information about shared VPC, see Shared VPC overview in the GCP documentation.

The installation program provisions the rest of the required infrastructure, which you can further customize. To customize the installation, you modify parameters in the install-config.yaml file before you install the cluster.

Prerequisites

• You reviewed details about the OKD installation and update processes.

• You read the documentation on selecting a cluster installation method and preparing it for users.

• If you use a firewall, you configured it to allow the sites that your cluster requires access to.

• If the cloud identity and access management (IAM) APIs are not accessible in your environment, or if you do not want to store an administrator-level credential secret in the kube-system namespace, you can manually create and maintain IAM credentials.

• You have a GCP host project which contains a shared VPC network.

• You configured a GCP project to host the cluster. This project, known as the service project, must be attached to the host project. For more information, see Attaching service projects in the GCP documentation.

• You have a GCP service account that has the required GCP permissions in the host project.

Generating a key pair for cluster node SSH access

During an OKD installation, you can provide an SSH public key to the installation program. The key is passed to the Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) nodes through their Ignition config files and is used to authenticate SSH access to the nodes. The key is added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys list for the core user on each node, which enables password-less authentication.

After the key is passed to the nodes, you can use the key pair to SSH in to the FCOS nodes as the user core. To access the nodes through SSH, the private key identity must be managed by SSH for your local user.

If you want to SSH in to your cluster nodes to perform installation debugging or disaster recovery, you must provide the SSH public key during the installation process. The ./openshift-install gather command also requires the SSH public key to be in place on the cluster nodes.

Procedure

1. If you do not have an existing SSH key pair on your local machine to use for authentication onto your cluster nodes, create one. For example, on a computer that uses a Linux operating system, run the following command:

   $ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -N '' -f <path>/<file_name> (1)

   1	Specify the path and file name, such as ~/.ssh/id_ed25519, of the new SSH key. If you have an existing key pair, ensure your public key is in the your ~/.ssh directory.

   If you plan to install an OKD cluster that uses FIPS Validated / Modules in Process cryptographic libraries on the x86_64 architecture, do not create a key that uses the ed25519 algorithm. Instead, create a key that uses the rsa or ecdsa algorithm.

2. View the public SSH key:

   $ cat <path>/<file_name>.pub

   For example, run the following to view the ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub public key:

   $ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

3. Add the SSH private key identity to the SSH agent for your local user, if it has not already been added. SSH agent management of the key is required for password-less SSH authentication onto your cluster nodes, or if you want to use the ./openshift-install gather command.

   On some distributions, default SSH private key identities such as ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_dsa are managed automatically.

   1. If the ssh-agent process is not already running for your local user, start it as a background task:

      $ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

      Example output

      Agent pid 31874

      If your cluster is in FIPS mode, only use FIPS-compliant algorithms to generate the SSH key. The key must be either RSA or ECDSA.

4. Add your SSH private key to the ssh-agent:

   $ ssh-add <path>/<file_name> (1)

   1	Specify the path and file name for your SSH private key, such as ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

   Example output

   Identity added: /home/<you>/<path>/<file_name> (<computer_name>)

Next steps

• When you install OKD, provide the SSH public key to the installation program.

Obtaining the installation program

Before you install OKD, download the installation file on the host you are using for installation.

Prerequisites

• You have a computer that runs Linux or macOS, with 500 MB of local disk space.

Procedure

1. Download installer from https://github.com/openshift/okd/releases

   The installation program creates several files on the computer that you use to install your cluster. You must keep the installation program and the files that the installation program creates after you finish installing the cluster. Both files are required to delete the cluster.

   Deleting the files created by the installation program does not remove your cluster, even if the cluster failed during installation. To remove your cluster, complete the OKD uninstallation procedures for your specific cloud provider.

2. Extract the installation program. For example, on a computer that uses a Linux operating system, run the following command:

   $ tar -xvf openshift-install-linux.tar.gz

3. Download your installation pull secret from the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager. This pull secret allows you to authenticate with the services that are provided by the included authorities, including Quay.io, which serves the container images for OKD components.

   Using a pull secret from the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager is not required. You can use a pull secret for another private registry. Or, if you do not need the cluster to pull images from a private registry, you can use {"auths":{"fake":{"auth":"aWQ6cGFzcwo="}}} as the pull secret when prompted during the installation.

   If you do not use the pull secret from the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager:

   • Red Hat Operators are not available.

   • The Telemetry and Insights operators do not send data to Red Hat.

   • Content from the Red Hat Container Catalog registry, such as image streams and Operators, are not available.

Creating the installation files for GCP

To install OKD on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into a shared VPC, you must generate the install-config.yaml file and modify it so that the cluster uses the correct VPC networks, DNS zones, and project names.

Manually creating the installation configuration file

You must manually create your installation configuration file when installing OKD on GCP into a shared VPC using installer-provisioned infrastructure.

Prerequisites

• You have an SSH public key on your local machine to provide to the installation program. The key will be used for SSH authentication onto your cluster nodes for debugging and disaster recovery.

• You have obtained the OKD installation program and the pull secret for your cluster.

Procedure

1. Create an installation directory to store your required installation assets in:

   $ mkdir <installation_directory>

   You must create a 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 OKD version.

2. Customize the sample install-config.yaml file template that is provided and save it in the <installation_directory>.

   You must name this configuration file install-config.yaml.

3. Back up the install-config.yaml file so that you can use it to install multiple clusters.

   The install-config.yaml file is consumed during the next step of the installation process. You must back it up now.

Sample customized install-config.yaml file for shared VPC installation

There are several configuration parameters which are required to install OKD on GCP using a shared VPC. The following is a sample install-config.yaml file which demonstrates these fields.

apiVersion: v1
baseDomain: example.com
credentialsMode: Passthrough (1)
metadata:
  name: cluster_name
platform:
  gcp:
    computeSubnet: shared-vpc-subnet-1 (2)
    controlPlaneSubnet: shared-vpc-subnet-2 (3)
    createFirewallRules: Disabled (4)
    network: shared-vpc (5)
    networkProjectID: host-project-name (6)
    publicDNSZone:
      id: public-dns-zone (7)
      project: host-project-name (8)
    projectID: service-project-name (9)
    region: us-east1
    defaultMachinePlatform:
      tags: (10)
      - global-tag1
controlPlane:
  name: master
  platform:
    gcp:
      tags: (10)
      - control-plane-tag1
      type: n2-standard-4
      zones:
      - us-central1-a
      - us-central1-c
  replicas: 3
compute:
- name: worker
  platform:
    gcp:
      tags: (10)
      - compute-tag1
      type: n2-standard-4
      zones:
      - us-central1-a
      - us-central1-c
  replicas: 3
networking:
  clusterNetwork:
  - cidr: 10.128.0.0/14
    hostPrefix: 23
  machineNetwork:
  - cidr: 10.0.0.0/16
pullSecret: '{"auths": ...}'
sshKey: ssh-ed25519 AAAA... (11)

Installation configuration parameters

Before you deploy an OKD cluster, you provide parameter values to describe your account on the cloud platform that hosts your cluster and optionally customize your cluster’s platform. When you create the install-config.yaml installation configuration file, you provide values for the required parameters through the command line. If you customize your cluster, you can modify the install-config.yaml file to provide more details about the platform.

Required configuration parameters

Required installation configuration parameters are described in the following table:

Network configuration parameters

You can customize your installation configuration based on the requirements of your existing network infrastructure. For example, you can expand the IP address block for the cluster network or provide different IP address blocks than the defaults.

Only IPv4 addresses are supported.

networking:
  clusterNetwork:
  - cidr: 10.128.0.0/14
    hostPrefix: 23

networking:
  serviceNetwork:
   - 172.30.0.0/16

networking:
  machineNetwork:
  - cidr: 10.0.0.0/16

Optional configuration parameters

Optional installation configuration parameters are described in the following table:

sshKey:
  <key1>
  <key2>
  <key3>

Additional Google Cloud Platform (GCP) configuration parameters

Additional GCP configuration parameters are described in the following table:

Configuring the cluster-wide proxy during installation

Production environments can deny direct access to the internet and instead have an HTTP or HTTPS proxy available. You can configure a new OKD cluster to use a proxy by configuring the proxy settings in the install-config.yaml file.

Prerequisites

• You have an existing install-config.yaml file.

• You reviewed the sites that your cluster requires access to and determined whether any of them need to bypass the proxy. By default, all cluster egress traffic is proxied, including calls to hosting cloud provider APIs. You added sites to the Proxy object’s spec.noProxy field to bypass the proxy if necessary.

  The Proxy object status.noProxy field is populated with the values of the networking.machineNetwork[].cidr, networking.clusterNetwork[].cidr, and networking.serviceNetwork[] fields from your installation configuration. For installations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack, the Proxy object status.noProxy field is also populated with the instance metadata endpoint (169.254.169.254).

Procedure

1. Edit your install-config.yaml file and add the proxy settings. For example:

   apiVersion: v1
   baseDomain: my.domain.com
   proxy:
     httpProxy: http://<username>:<pswd>@<ip>:<port> (1)
     httpsProxy: https://<username>:<pswd>@<ip>:<port> (2)
     noProxy: example.com (3)
   additionalTrustBundle: | (4)
       -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
       <MY_TRUSTED_CA_CERT>
       -----END CERTIFICATE-----
   additionalTrustBundlePolicy: <policy_to_add_additionalTrustBundle> (5)

   1	A proxy URL to use for creating HTTP connections outside the cluster. The URL scheme must be http.
   2	A proxy URL to use for creating HTTPS connections outside the cluster.
   3	A comma-separated list of destination domain names, IP addresses, or other network CIDRs to exclude from proxying. Preface a domain with . to match subdomains only. For example, .y.com matches x.y.com, but not y.com. Use * to bypass the proxy for all destinations.
   4	If provided, the installation program generates a config map that is named user-ca-bundle in the openshift-config namespace that contains one or more additional CA certificates that are required for proxying HTTPS connections. The Cluster Network Operator then creates a trusted-ca-bundle config map that merges these contents with the Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) trust bundle, and this config map is referenced in the trustedCA field of the Proxy object. The additionalTrustBundle field is required unless the proxy’s identity certificate is signed by an authority from the FCOS trust bundle.
   5	Optional: The policy to determine the configuration of the Proxy object to reference the user-ca-bundle config map in the trustedCA field. The allowed values are Proxyonly and Always. Use Proxyonly to reference the user-ca-bundle config map only when http/https proxy is configured. Use Always to always reference the user-ca-bundle config map. The default value is Proxyonly.

   The installation program does not support the proxy readinessEndpoints field.

2. Save the file and reference it when installing OKD.

The installation program creates a cluster-wide proxy that is named cluster that uses the proxy settings in the provided install-config.yaml file. If no proxy settings are provided, a cluster Proxy object is still created, but it will have a nil spec.

Deploying the cluster

You can install OKD on a compatible cloud platform.

Prerequisites

• Configure an account with the cloud platform that hosts your cluster.

• Obtain the OKD installation program and the pull secret for your cluster.

Procedure

1. Remove any existing GCP credentials that do not use the service account key for the GCP account that you configured for your cluster and that are stored in the following locations:

   • The GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS, GOOGLE_CLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON, or GCLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON environment variables

   • The ~/.gcp/osServiceAccount.json file

   • The gcloud cli default credentials

2. Change to the directory that contains the installation program and initialize the cluster deployment:

   $ ./openshift-install create cluster --dir <installation_directory> \ (1)
       --log-level=info (2)

   1	For <installation_directory>, specify the location of your customized ./install-config.yaml file.
   2	To view different installation details, specify warn, debug, or error instead of info.

   If the cloud provider account that you configured on your host does not have sufficient permissions to deploy the cluster, the installation process stops, and the missing permissions are displayed.

3. Optional: You can reduce the number of permissions for the service account that you used to install the cluster.

   • If you assigned the Owner role to your service account, you can remove that role and replace it with the Viewer role.

   • If you included the Service Account Key Admin role, you can remove it.

Verification

When the cluster deployment completes successfully:

• The terminal displays directions for accessing your cluster, including a link to the web console and credentials for the kubeadmin user.

• Credential information also outputs to <installation_directory>/.openshift_install.log.

Example output

...
INFO Install complete!
INFO To access the cluster as the system:admin user when using 'oc', run 'export KUBECONFIG=/home/myuser/install_dir/auth/kubeconfig'
INFO Access the OpenShift web-console here: https://console-openshift-console.apps.mycluster.example.com
INFO Login to the console with user: "kubeadmin", and password: "4vYBz-Ee6gm-ymBZj-Wt5AL"
INFO Time elapsed: 36m22s

Installing the OpenShift CLI by downloading the binary

You can install the OpenShift CLI (oc) to interact with OKD from a command-line interface. You can install oc on Linux, Windows, or macOS.

Installing the OpenShift CLI on Linux

You can install the OpenShift CLI (oc) binary on Linux by using the following procedure.

Procedure

1. Navigate to link:https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/oc/latest/ and choose the folder for your operating system and architecture.

2. Download oc.tar.gz.

3. Unpack the archive:

   $ tar xvzf <file>

4. Place the oc binary in a directory that is on your PATH.

   To check your PATH, execute the following command:

   $ echo $PATH

After you install the OpenShift CLI, it is available using the oc command:

$ oc <command>

Installing the OpenShift CLI on Windows

You can install the OpenShift CLI (oc) binary on Windows by using the following procedure.

Procedure

1. Navigate to link:https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/oc/latest/ and choose the folder for your operating system and architecture.

2. Download oc.zip.

3. Unzip the archive with a ZIP program.

4. Move the oc binary to a directory that is on your PATH.

   To check your PATH, open the command prompt and execute the following command:

   C:\> path

After you install the OpenShift CLI, it is available using the oc command:

C:\> oc <command>

Installing the OpenShift CLI on macOS

You can install the OpenShift CLI (oc) binary on macOS by using the following procedure.

Procedure

1. Navigate to link:https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/oc/latest/ and choose the folder for your operating system and architecture.

2. Download oc.tar.gz.

3. Unpack and unzip the archive.

4. Move the oc binary to a directory on your PATH.

   To check your PATH, open a terminal and execute the following command:

   $ echo $PATH

After you install the OpenShift CLI, it is available using the oc command:

$ oc <command>

Logging in to the cluster by using the CLI

You can log in to your cluster as a default system user by exporting the cluster kubeconfig file. The kubeconfig file contains information about the cluster that is used by the CLI to connect a client to the correct cluster and API server. The file is specific to a cluster and is created during OKD installation.

Prerequisites

• You deployed an OKD cluster.

• You installed the oc CLI.

Procedure

1. Export the kubeadmin credentials:

   $ export KUBECONFIG=<installation_directory>/auth/kubeconfig (1)

   1	For <installation_directory>, specify the path to the directory that you stored the installation files in.

2. Verify you can run oc commands successfully using the exported configuration:

   $ oc whoami

   Example output

   system:admin

Optional: Adding Ingress DNS records for shared VPC installations

If the public DNS zone exists in a host project outside the project where you installed your cluster, you must manually create DNS records that point at the Ingress load balancer. You can create either a wildcard *.apps.{baseDomain}. or specific records. You can use A, CNAME, and other records per your requirements.

Prerequisites

• You completed the installation of OKD on GCP into a shared VPC.

• Your public DNS zone exists in a host project separate from the service project that contains your cluster.

Procedure

1. Verify that the Ingress router has created a load balancer and populated the EXTERNAL-IP field by running the following command:

   $ oc -n openshift-ingress get service router-default

   Example output

   NAME             TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                      AGE
   router-default   LoadBalancer   172.30.18.154   35.233.157.184   80:32288/TCP,443:31215/TCP   98

2. Record the external IP address of the router by running the following command:

   $ oc -n openshift-ingress get service router-default --no-headers | awk '{print $4}'

3. Add a record to your GCP public zone with the router’s external IP address and the name *.apps.<cluster_name>.<cluster_domain>. You can use the gcloud command line utility or the GCP web console.

4. To add manual records instead of a wildcard record, create entries for each of the cluster’s current routes. You can gather these routes by running the following command:

   $ oc get --all-namespaces -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{range .status.ingress[*]}{.host}{"\n"}{end}{end}' routes

   Example output

   oauth-openshift.apps.your.cluster.domain.example.com
   console-openshift-console.apps.your.cluster.domain.example.com
   downloads-openshift-console.apps.your.cluster.domain.example.com
   alertmanager-main-openshift-monitoring.apps.your.cluster.domain.example.com
   prometheus-k8s-openshift-monitoring.apps.your.cluster.domain.example.com

Additional resources

• See Accessing the web console for more details about accessing and understanding the OKD web console.

Additional resources

• See About remote health monitoring for more information about the Telemetry service

Next steps

• Customize your cluster.

• If necessary, you can opt out of remote health reporting.