Installing Openshift: The hard way!

Welcome to my adventure learning Red Hat Openshift.
And before you start asking why I am doing this way, remember, I am learning and doing it the hard way!

My repository for this project is:
Git repository

Scenario

I am trying to replicate the same scenario as I encountered in the companies I worked for. Usually they are:

• Offline environment (cluster does not have access to the internet).
• Different machines for each service (company wild load balance, DNS, DHCP managed by different servers)
• Network segregation (multiple networks for each part of the cluster)

Testing Environment

To see how my lab is configured and how it looks. Please check my dev.to blog post.

Building my home lab

Install Proxmox 9

Topology

I will be running everything into my proxmox server. The physical layer will look like this

The virtual portion will be more like this:

DNS

• You need a properly configured DNS zone.
• Forward and reverse DNS records for all nodes.
• Wildcard DNS entry for application routes (e.g. *.apps.cluster.example.com).
• Internal name resolution between nodes.

Load Balancer

Balances traffic for:

• API servers (port 6443 – control plane access).
• Ingress controllers (HTTP/HTTPS routes for applications).

NTP (Network Time Protocol)

All cluster nodes need synchronized time.

DHCP

Not strictly required if you use static IP addressing.
Helps in labs or dynamic environments for auto-provisioning.

External Storage

For production workloads, you need persistent storage.
Options: NFS, iSCSI, Ceph/Rook, NetApp, Portworx.

Bastion Host

This VM will be the bridge between our internal and external network and will also host the offline registry required for openshift installation files.

Bootstrap Host

This is a temporary host that is used for the cluster configuration. It will be deleted after the installation is completed

Control Plane Hosts

Essential for the cluster operation, those hosts will contain all the control functions of the cluster.

### Worker Hosts
Where the containers will run.

Building the VMs

Check my post where I go over the process of building VMs on proxmox.
Creating VMs on Proxmox

The bastion host.

The next step I will cover how I install Linux and configure this node. Stay tuned...