Who is the new guy blogging?
Before getting into the topic, I wanted to introduce myself.
My name is Mike Kostersitz, I am Principal Program Manager and just joined the core networking team in the Cloud and AI organization. I will be focusing on expanding the Windows container networking ecosystem, work with partners to bring their solutions to Windows and bridge the gap between Linux and Windows systems in the container space.
Enough of the intro. Let’s jump in.
What is Red Hat OpenShift
In short OpenShift enables build and deployment automation as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery for container systems built on kubernetes. At a high level OpenShift is an open source container management platform which sits on top of the Kubernetes Container orchestration system and the a container runtime (see here for the supported runtimes).
My colleague David Schott has covered the current state of Kubernetes support for Windows Microsoft is working with the RedHat OpenShift team to enable management of mixed clusters using the OpenShift platform toolset and allow for deployment of mixed clusters using OpenShift.
OpenShift for Windows will enable managing Windows server 2019 Nodes and containers in a mixed Linux and Windows OpenShift deployment.
The solution will be run on RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.x and use for now Windows Server 1803 worker nodes. The nodes can be physical or virtual.
In the simple example below, we deploy two virtual machines, one to run the Red Hat OpenShift master node and one to be the worker node for the Windows Containers running Windows Server Core.
To enable network connectivity the solution will use the Cloudbase OVN/OVS CNI plugin and to allow seamless setup the cluster will require a DNS and a DHCP server. The DHCP server will be used to assign IP addresses to the Windows worker node and all pods in the system.
(Note to self: Don’t deploy a DHCP server in your corporate network. Bad things might happen, such as everyone in the local area getting a non-routable IP address from your server blocking internet and corporate resource access.)
- The high-level deployment of the components looks like the below diagram.
- The master node currently runs Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11 on top of RHEL 7.5.
- The worker node runs Windows Server Core, currently 1803 but soon on Windows Server 2019.
- Both use the Cloudbase Solutions developed OVS/OVN plug in for networking. We are working on adding other CNI plug ins before release.
- The networking mode is setup as an overlay network but will support other modes too.
OpenShift for Windows example deployment
Summary
OpenShift support for Windows is coming and will provide the build, deployment and CI/CD capabilities of OpenShift on Linux to Windows Server.
While we have not set a final release date yet for OpenShift on Windows we are working closely with the OpenShift team at RedHat and are looking forward to release a preview of what is to come sometime in the first half of next year.
Stay tuned for more on this topic as things develop.
Thanks for reading this far and keep an eye out for our next post on OpenShift for Windows
Editors Note: 11/14/18: Updated formatting and fixed a typo