Bare Metal OpenShift

My Journey

My Homelab — Current State

I use my home lab as a playground for learning new technology, or at least new to me. I’ve had some success with my experiences and some failures.

I’m a Red Hat Certified Architect so most of the technology that I play with is Red Hat infrastructure related.

In a previous post I talked about running OpenShift on bare metal for the purpose of helping me guide my customers through their journey. In this post I describe my homelab and the specifics of what I am trying to accomplish

I decided to flip my home lab on its head and to build an architecture based using Kubernetes at the core. My goal with this effort is to understand, albeit on a small scale, some of the challenges my customers will face going down this path.

My lab infrastructure has been very traditional in that it used a virtualization layer (Red Hat Virtualization) on top of three servers connected to an NFS server. On top of that virtualization layer I run Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and OpenShift Container Storage.

A key part of my infrastructure is the Ansible Automation Platform. In the traditional version it runs in a VM.

This infrastructure has served me quite well. It’s gotten me through dozens of customer demonstrations and my RHCA. Overall I was quite happy with it.

My Homelab — Future State

But change is good!

Keeping with my goal of using Kubernetes at the core I have created an architecture plan that mimics potential use cases that I am beginning to see with my customers.

This architecture will lay Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform down on bare metal using local disk to form the foundation of my new lab. On top of that I will use OpenShift Container Storage as my storage layer also using local disk.

Advanced Cluster Manager for Kubernetes, Ansible Automation Platform and OpenShift Virtualization complete my base installation.

With these components I intend to recreate and expand on my current demonstration environment by:

• Modifying my Ansible playbooks to create virtual machines using kubevirt instead of ovirt
• Updating my Ansible playbooks and templates to take advantage of Ansible Automation Platform 2
• Connecting my virtual machines to Red Hat Insights to validate compliance as described in this blog.
• Using Advanced Cluster Manager to create clusters in the public cloud and to create Single Node OpenShift instances

I hope you join me on my journey as I document what I learned through this build out in this series.