OpenShift 4 Disconnected Bundler

A tool that makes it easier to get started when deploying OpenShift clusters in a disconnected / air-gapped networks. The tool will bundle up all of the required dependencies (e.g. container images, CLI tools, etc.) that can be transfered to the disconnected environment. The generated bundle includes a script to unpack and host the artifacts in the disconnected environment so that they can be used to install OpenShift.

Documentation

The following documentation will walk you through how to use this tool. Included in this repository is a CloudFormation script that will create a simulated disconnected environment that you can use to try it out. To assist in illustrating how to use this tool, this documentation will take advantage of an environment created using that CloudFormation script.

If you are providing your own environment, you can skip ahead to the Bundle Content section.

At a high level, the process for using this tool to deploy an OpenShift cluster in a disconnected environment looks like this:

• Using a host with access to the internet, run this tool to download all of the content required for an OpenShift install and bundle it
• Transfer the generated content bundle to the disconnected environment (we will use S3 in our example)
• Create a RHEL host in the disconnected environment and pull the bundle of content to the host
• Unpack the bundle and run the provided script to stand up the required supporting infrastructure (e.g. container registry) and generate the configuration required to install in a disconnected environment
• Run the OpenShift installer after adding the required configuration

Prepare Environment

As mentioned above, we are going to create a simulated disconnected environment in AWS using a CloudFormation script provided in this repository.

Export the required environment variables to setup your AWS credentials and region.

# If you do not have AWS credentials configured, export these instead:
# export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
# export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=
export AWS_PROFILE=rhdp
export AWS_REGION=us-east-2

The only required parameter for the CloudFormation script is the name of the key pair you wish to use to be able to SSH into the EC2 instances that are created. If you do not already have a key pair, you can easily create one using your existing SSH public key.

ssh-keygen -q -N '' -f ~/.ssh/ocp4-disconnected

aws ec2 import-key-pair --key-name ocp4-disconnected --public-key-material fileb://~/.ssh/ocp4-disconnected.pub

Once your key pair is in place, create the simulated disconnected environment using the CloudFormation script.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redhatgov/ocp4-disconnected/main/hack/cloudformation.yaml -o /tmp/ocp4-disconnected-cf.yaml

aws cloudformation create-stack \
    --stack-name ocp4-disconnected \
    --template-body file:///tmp/ocp4-disconnected-cf.yaml \
    --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
    --parameters "ParameterKey=KeyName,ParameterValue=ocp4-disconnected"

Wait for the CloudFormation stack to finish deploying. Once the output is CREATE_COMPLETE, you can use Ctrl-C to exit the watch command. It usually takes in the ballpark of 5-6 minutes to deploy the entire stack.

watch -n 10 aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name ocp4-disconnected --query 'Stacks[0].StackStatus'

Now that the CloudFormation stack has finished deploying, we can capture the output in order to get the IP addresses we need in order to connect to the EC2 instances that were created.

aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name ocp4-disconnected --query 'Stacks[0].Outputs'

However, as we go through this walkthrough, the commands to grab the value from the outputs will be provided.

Next: Bundle Content >>