Installing

OpenShift Container Platform 4.6

Installing and configuring OpenShift Container Platform clusters

Red Hat OpenShift Documentation Team

Abstract

This document provides information about installing OpenShift Container Platform and details about some configuration processes.

Chapter 1. Mirroring images for a disconnected installation

You can use the procedures in this section to ensure your clusters only use container images that satisfy your organizational controls on external content. Before you install a cluster on infrastructure that you provision in a restricted network, you must mirror the required container images into that environment. To mirror container images, you must have a registry for mirroring.

Important

You must have access to the internet to obtain the necessary container images. In this procedure, you place your mirror registry on a mirror host that has access to both your network and the Internet. If you do not have access to a mirror host, use the Mirroring an Operator catalog procedure to copy images to a device you can move across network boundaries with.

1.1. Prerequisites

  • You must have a container image registry that supports Docker v2-2 in the location that will host the OpenShift Container Platform cluster, such as one of the following registries:

    If you have an entitlement to Red Hat Quay, see the documentation on deploying Red Hat Quay for proof-of-concept purposes or by using the Quay Operator. If you need additional assistance selecting and installing a registry, contact your sales representative or Red Hat support.

  • If you do not already have an existing solution for a container image registry, subscribers of OpenShift Container Platform are provided a mirror registry for Red Hat OpenShift. The mirror registry for Red Hat OpenShift is included with your subscription and is a small-scale container registry that can be used to mirror the required container images of OpenShift Container Platform in disconnected installations.

1.2. About the mirror registry

You can mirror the images that are required for OpenShift Container Platform installation and subsequent product updates to a container mirror registry such as Red Hat Quay, JFrog Artifactory, Sonatype Nexus Repository, or Harbor. If you do not have access to a large-scale container registry, you can use the mirror registry for Red Hat OpenShift, a small-scale container registry included with OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions.

You can use any container registry that supports Docker v2-2, such as Red Hat Quay, the mirror registry for Red Hat OpenShift, Artifactory, Sonatype Nexus Repository, or Harbor. Regardless of your chosen registry, the procedure to mirror content from Red Hat hosted sites on the internet to an isolated image registry is the same. After you mirror the content, you configure each cluster to retrieve this content from your mirror registry.

Important

The internal registry of the OpenShift Container Platform cluster cannot be used as the target registry because it does not support pushing without a tag, which is required during the mirroring process.

If choosing a container registry that is not the mirror registry for Red Hat OpenShift, it must be reachable by every machine in the clusters that you provision. If the registry is unreachable, installation, updating, or normal operations such as workload relocation might fail. For that reason, you must run mirror registries in a highly available way, and the mirror registries must at least match the production availability of your OpenShift Container Platform clusters.

When you populate your mirror registry with OpenShift Container Platform images, you can follow two scenarios. If you have a host that can access both the internet and your mirror registry, but not your cluster nodes, you can directly mirror the content from that machine. This process is referred to as connected mirroring. If you have no such host, you must mirror the images to a file system and then bring that host or removable media into your restricted environment. This process is referred to as disconnected mirroring.

For mirrored registries, to view the source of pulled images, you must review the Trying to access log entry in the CRI-O logs. Other methods to view the image pull source, such as using the crictl images command on a node, show the non-mirrored image name, even though the image is pulled from the mirrored location.

Note

Red Hat does not test third party registries with OpenShift Container Platform.

Additional information

For information on viewing the CRI-O logs to view the image source, see Viewing the image pull source.

1.3. Preparing your mirror host

Before you perform the mirror procedure, you must prepare the host to retrieve content and push it to the remote location.

1.3.1. Installing the OpenShift CLI by downloading the binary

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

Important

If you installed an earlier version of oc, you cannot use it to complete all of the commands in OpenShift Container Platform 4.6. Download and install the new version of oc.

1.3.1.1. 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 the OpenShift Container Platform downloads page on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
  2. Select the appropriate version in the Version drop-down menu.
  3. Click Download Now next to the OpenShift v4.6 Linux Client entry and save the file.

  4. Unpack the archive: 

    $ tar xvzf <file>

  5. 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>

1.3.1.2. 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 the OpenShift Container Platform downloads page on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
  2. Select the appropriate version in the Version drop-down menu.
  3. Click Download Now next to the OpenShift v4.6 Windows Client entry and save the file.
  4. Unzip the archive with a ZIP program.

  5. 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>

1.3.1.3. 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 the OpenShift Container Platform downloads page on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
  2. Select the appropriate version in the Version drop-down menu.
  3. Click Download Now next to the OpenShift v4.6 MacOSX Client entry and save the file.
  4. Unpack and unzip the archive.

  5. 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>

1.4. Configuring credentials that allow images to be mirrored

Create a container image registry credentials file that allows mirroring images from Red Hat to your mirror.

Warning

Do not use this image registry credentials file as the pull secret when you install a cluster. If you provide this file when you install cluster, all of the machines in the cluster will have write access to your mirror registry.

Warning

This process requires that you have write access to a container image registry on the mirror registry and adds the credentials to a registry pull secret.

Prerequisites

  • You configured a mirror registry to use in your restricted network.
  • You identified an image repository location on your mirror registry to mirror images into.
  • You provisioned a mirror registry account that allows images to be uploaded to that image repository.

Procedure

Complete the following steps on the installation host:

  1. Download your registry.redhat.io pull secret from the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager and save it to a .json file.

  2. Generate the base64-encoded user name and password or token for your mirror registry: 

    $ echo -n '<user_name>:<password>' | base64 -w0 1
BGVtbYk3ZHAtqXs=
    1
    For <user_name> and <password>, specify the user name and password that you configured for your registry.

  3. Make a copy of your pull secret in JSON format: 

    $ cat ./pull-secret.text | jq .  > <path>/<pull_secret_file_in_json>1
    1
    Specify the path to the folder to store the pull secret in and a name for the JSON file that you create.

    The contents of the file resemble the following example: 

    {
  "auths": {
    "cloud.openshift.com": {
      "auth": "b3BlbnNo...",
      "email": "you@example.com"
    },
    "quay.io": {
      "auth": "b3BlbnNo...",
      "email": "you@example.com"
    },
    "registry.connect.redhat.com": {
      "auth": "NTE3Njg5Nj...",
      "email": "you@example.com"
    },
    "registry.redhat.i