OpenShift Administrator’s Office Hour - Windows Containers

This week Christian Hernandez, Technical Marketing Manager for Red Hat Cloud Platforms Business Unit, joined the live stream to show off Windows containers in OpenShift. Currently available as a community Operator, Windows containers are expected to become generally available with OpenShift 4.7 and enable Windows Server 2019 worker nodes to join OpenShift and host Windows containers workloads. As a developer, this means that you have one platform for both Linux and Windows-based application components and as an administrator the consolidation of infrastructure (hopefully!) makes life more simple.

As always, please see the list below for additional links to specific topics, questions, and supporting materials for the episode!

If you’re interested in more streaming content, please subscribe to the OpenShift.tv streaming calendar to see the upcoming episode topics and to receive any schedule changes. If you have questions or topic suggestions for the OpenShift Administrator’s Office Hour, please contact us via Discord, Twitter, or come join us live, Wednesdays at 11am EST / 1600 UTC, on YouTube and Twitch.

Episode 18 recorded stream:

Supporting links for today’s topic:

• You’ll need to deploy your OpenShift cluster using vSphere with the full-stack automation, a.k.a. installer provisioned infrastructure or IPI, experience using the OVN-Kubernetes SDN and with hybrid networking enabled.
• Christian spent some time walking through the architecture and how Windows nodes and Windows containers are integrated into OpenShift.
• The Windows Machine Config Operator is the “special sauce” used to configure Windows nodes in the OpenShift cluster.
• If you want to jump straight to creating a Windows VM template, deploying the Windows Machine Config Operator, and creating Windows nodes, use this link!

Other links and materials referenced during the stream:

• Following up from last week, we closed the loop on modifying the default project template. Turns out that I was just impatient and didn’t wait long enough for the API server instances to restart, oops!
• We briefly discussed etcd performance requirements, including how to test performance and how to troubleshoot. We’ll cover this topic in-depth during the March 10th stream, be sure to watch that day if you have questions!
• Addressing an internally asked question from the Red Hat field, what happens when you accidentally delete the template VM used for vSphere or RHV full-stack automation (IPI) deployments?
• Is vSphere full-stack automation (IPI) supported in disconnected environments? Yes, it sure is! But, the docs are currently very misleading about it. You’ll need to download the OVA, host it on the disconnected network, and point the installer to it in the install config to deploy.