Deploying OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA (GUI)

OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of OpenShift that allows you to run virtual machines alongside your containers. This is useful for running legacy applications that can’t be containerized, or for running applications that require special hardware or software that isn’t available in a container.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to deploy OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) using the OpenShift Console. I’ll show you how to deploy the OpenShift Virtualization operator, and create a virtual machine all from inside the Red Hat Cluster Manager and OpenShift Console

It’s important to keep in mind that this tutorial is designed to show you the quickest way to get started with OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA. It’s not designed to be a production-ready deployment. If you’re planning to deploy OpenShift Virtualization in a production environment, you should follow the official documentation and best practices.

If you don’t want to deploy the resources yourself, you can watch the video below to see how it’s done.

Pre-requisites

1. You will need a A ROSA Cluster (see Deploying ROSA HCP with Terraform if you need help creating one).

2. Browse to the OpenShift Cluster Manager and select your cluster, then click on the “Machine Pools” tab.

   

3. Click on the “Add Machine Pool” button, give it a name, and select a Bare Metal instance type such as m5zn.metal, set replicas to 1 and click Add machine pool.

   

4. When that’s done, click on the Open Console button to open the OpenShift Console, then go to the Operators -> OperatorHub page and search for Virtualization.

   

5. Accept all the defaults and click the blue “Install” button. Once installed it should prompt you to Create a HyperConverged instance, click the blue Create HyperConverged button. Once again accept all of the defaults.

   

6. Once deployed it should notify you that you should refresh your browser, after which there will be a new Virtualization menu item in the left-hand navigation, click on that and then Catalog -> Template catalog.

   Note: Make sure you’re in the default project (or create a new one)

   

7. Pick your preferred OS, in this case, we’ll use CentOS Stream 8 VM, click on that and then click Customize VirtualMachine.

   

8. Click on the Scripts tab, and click the Edit button next to the Public SSH Key title. Click “Add new” and paste in your public SSH key, check the Automatically apply this key to any new Virtual Machine you create in this project then click Save.

   

9. Click Create VirtualMachine

   

10. After a while the VM will be running and you’ll see a preview of the VNC console.

    

11. From here you can click Open web console to get an interactive VNC console, or you can SSH into the VM using the virtctl command.

    

12. Congratulations! You now have a virtual machine running on OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA!