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Senior Web & Mobile Developer

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Start Kubernetes on Windows from Minikube with Vmware

Hi, I think you've already read how to setting up kubernetes on Windows with Minikube from here:
https://dev.to/harshadranganathan/setting-up-kubernetes-on-windows-with-minikube-2pp6

Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day.

When I installed VMware on my local system, it worked a little different, so I'd like to describe my little experience.

I experienced these kubernetes and minikube in Ubuntu 20.04, and I am going to describe in compare to Linux.

Let's start from installing Chocolatey.

Install Chocolatey

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows similar to apt install in MacOS. It simplifies our installation process so we will use it here.

Open PowerShell as an administrator and run below commands.

Get-ExecutionPolicy

Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned

iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
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Install Minikube

After chocolately is installed, run below command to install Minikube.

choco install minikube
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@Harshad described above V0.27 have an issue with shutdown, I had not experienced yet...

Install VMware driver

If you are going to use VMWare as the driver for Minikube, then run below command. If you installed VMWare software already, skip it.

choco install virtualbox -y
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Start Minikube

Open PowerShell as an administrator and run this command.

minikube start
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Then Minikube will follow steps in below:

  • Downloads MinikubeISO and places it in .minikube folder in your user directory(E.g. C:/users/[username]/.minikube)
  • Connects to VMware and runs a minikube virtual machine
  • Downloads the necessary files and moves them to the cluster
  • Runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside the VM

Check minikube status

To check if minikube is running use below command

minikube status
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Output is below

minikube: Running
cluster: Running
kubectl: Correctly Configured: pointing to minikube-vm at

Run below command to access the Kubernetes dashboard:

minikube dashboard

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