Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 1: Overview

The past few days I have been involved in an Openshift + NSX-T POC. In fact, 2 POCs because we setup one time at the customer lab and at the same I also repeat the same steps in my own lab so that I can learn as well. Before I proceed further, I would to shout out to Yasen, the NSBU TPM to guide me on the installation of the Openshift and integrating with NSX-T. Without his guidance and his help with the POC, this article would not be possible. As a promise, I would write a blog on the installation because I believe many in the community and my peers would need help in setting this up.

I’m going to break up the articles into various parts. *Inspirations from William Lam who did the PKS with NSX-T series.

Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 1: Overview
Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 2: NSX-T
Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 3: RHEL Preperation
Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 4: Openshift Installation
Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 5: NCP and CNI Integration
Openshift with NSX-T Installation Part 6: Demo App

Components:

Software Download:

Here is the complete list of software that needs to be downloaded to deploy Openshift and NSX-T.

Software Download URL
NSX-T  https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?productId=673&downloadGroup=NSX-T-210
nsx-unified-appliance-2.1.0.0.0.7395503.ova
nsx-edge-2.1.0.0.0.7395502.ova
nsx-controller-2.1.0.0.0.7395493.ova
nsx-container-2.1.3.8356796.zip
RHEL https://access.redhat.com/downloads/
The version I used: rhel-server-7.5-x86_64-dvd.iso

Screen Shot 2018-05-16 at 3.01.02 PM

Lab Environment:

For my Lab, I will be using two physical hosts. One host for the NSX-T management components and the other host to be the NSX-T Transport Node which will house the Openshift VMs which is one Master and two Node VMs. You can see there are 3 physical nodes in my cluster because I am using vSAN here as my shared storage. My lab is a non-nested setup but at the customer POC, we setup a nested environment using William Lam NSX-T Auto-Deploy Script and that works as well.

Screen Shot 2018-05-15 at 6.34.20 AM

The good part of NSX-T is that you can select which hosts you would like to prepare as transport node instead of the whole cluster. You could also add in all the hosts in the whole cluster to be prepared as transport nodes with the use of the Compute Manager. In this case, I only selected 192.168.1.202 hosts as the transport node. The other two nodes are not prepared as transport nodes.

Screen Shot 2018-05-15 at 6.37.41 AM

Compute/Storage

VM CPU MEM DISK
NSX-T Manager 4 16GB 140GB
NSX-T Controller x 3 4 16GB 120GB
NSX-Edge x 2 (Medium Size) 4 8GB 120GB
Openshift Master 4 16GB 40GB
Openshift Node01 4 16GB 40GB
Openshift Node02 4 16GB 40GB

Networking

Defined within your physical or virtual network infrastructure

Defined within NSX-T

Here is a logical diagram of my planned Openshift + NSX-T deployment:

Screen Shot 2018-05-17 at 10.01.19 AM