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MicroShift Development Environment in Cloud

Introduction

The MicroShift development environment should be set up on a local workstation as a collection of virtual machines.

However, depending on a local workstation hardware configuration and operating system, it may not always be possible to set up the desired development environment, as in the following cases.

  • Different hardware platform setup (i.e. x86_64 local hardware vs aarch64 development environment or vice versa)
  • Lack of hardware resources (e.g. not enough RAM or local storage)

In such cases, it is recommended to use a public cloud for setting up the MicroShift Development environment, as described in the remainder of this document.

Public Cloud Configuration

The goal is to use public cloud resources for setting up the following configuration.

  • The development machine running on a cloud virtual instance
  • The RHEL for Edge virtual machine running as a nested virtual instance on the development host
  • Optionally, the Ansible control node virtual machine running as a nested virtual instance on the development host

This configuration provides for the required functionality and flexibility neccessary for the MicroShift development and testing environments.

The MicroShift development machine requires at least 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM and 100 GB of disk space.

AWS Cloud

Start by selecting the right region providing the necessary metal instance types for effective support of nested virtualization. Price is the main guiding factor in the choice of a metal instance type because of the modest hardware requirements of the MicroShift development environment.

For MicroShift development and testing in a RHEL for Edge host setup, it is recommended to use the following instances with hardware virtualization support:

  • For the x86_64 architecture, one of the c5 instances (i.e. c5n.metal)
  • For the aarch64 architecture, one of the c6g instances (i.e. c6g.metal)

For a MicroShift development-only host setup, it is recommended to use the following instances without hardware virtualization support:

The Europe (Ireland) eu-west-1 or US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 regions are recommended as they usually have the widest selection of hardware options.

Review and configure the following VPC resources.

  • A default VPC should be sufficient
  • A default subnet in one of the availability zones with access to the Internet

Review and configure the following EC2 resources.

  • A default security group with Inbound rules set to only allow SSH traffic on port 22. It is recommended to further restrict access to the SSH port from your IP address.
  • Import your Key Pair used for accessing the virtual instances

Proceed by creating a virtual instance using the following parameters.

  • Use a descriptive name prefixed by your user name if the account is shared with others (i.e. myuser-ushift-dev)
  • Select the Red Hat Linux operating system family
  • Select the 64-bit (x86) or 64 bit (Arm) architecture
  • Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (HVM) operating system.
  • Select the instance type depending on your architecture of choice:
    • e.g. c5.metal for x86_64
    • e.g. c6g.metal for aarch64
  • Select your Key pair
  • Select your security group, only allowing SSH port 22 inbound traffic
  • Configure storage with the following volumes:
    • 90 GiB root volume on gp3 storage type
    • 10 GiB data volume on gp3 storage type

Review your selections and lauch the cloud instance.

Unless noted otherwise, all further configuration should be performed on the cloud instance created in this section.

Other Cloud Environments

Other public cloud vendors and environments should also be suitable for running the MicroShift development environment, provided the appropriate hardware and operating system configuration is available.

Development Virtual Machine

Log into the cloud instance using the appropriate login credential (i.e. ec2-user for AWS) and a private SSH key.

ssh -i ~/.ssh/<private_key> ec2-user@<instance_public_IP>

Create and configure the microshift user account, also allowing SSH logins using a password.

PASSWORD="<strong password>"

sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash -p "$(openssl passwd -1 ${PASSWORD})" microshift
echo -e 'microshift\tALL=(ALL)\tNOPASSWD: ALL' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/microshift

sudo sed -i 's/PasswordAuthentication.*/PasswordAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo systemctl reload sshd.service

Choose a strong password and make sure you configure the security group to limit inbound connections on the SSH port 22 only from your IP address.

Log into the microshift user account and run the following commands to create an LVM volume and group on the data volume of the virtual instance. This disk space will be used by the MicroShift TopoLVM operator for storing data.

Run the lsblk command to see the device name of the 10 GiB storage volume allocated during the instance creation.

DEVICE=/dev/nvme1n1

sudo dnf install -y lvm2
sudo pvcreate      ${DEVICE}
sudo vgcreate rhel ${DEVICE}

Finish by running the scripts/devenv-builder/configure-vm.sh script to perform the initial configuration as described in the Configure Virtual Machine document.

Reboot your host in the end of the configuration procedure to make sure it is running the latest operating system components.

Nested Virtualization

Nested virtualization allows for a greater flexibility, lesser complexity and reuse of the documented procedures when creating RHEL for Edge images in a public cloud. The performance of such a configuration may be reduced, but it is sufficient for the purpose of testing.

RHEL for Edge Virtual Machine

Log into the development virtual machine running in the cloud using the microshift user account.

Follow the instructions in the Install MicroShift on RHEL for Edge document to create an ISO and install a new virtual machine using nested virtualization.

In the Install MicroShift for Edge section, use the following commands to install the virtualization prerequisites and bootstrap a virtual machine using the ISO image from the _output/image-builder directory.

VMNAME=microshift-edge
NETNAME=default

./scripts/image-builder/manage-vm.sh config

sudo mv "$(ls -1 "_output/image-builder/microshift-installer-*.$(uname -m).iso")" /var/lib/libvirt/images/ 
sudo -b bash -c " \
cd /var/lib/libvirt/images/ && \
virt-install \
    --name ${VMNAME} \
    --vcpus 2 \
    --memory 3072 \
    --disk path=./${VMNAME}.qcow2,size=20 \
    --network network=${NETNAME},model=virtio \
    --events on_reboot=restart \
    --cdrom ./microshift-installer-*.$(uname -m).iso \
    --noautoconsole \
    --wait \
"

Ansible Control Node Virtual Machine

Log into the development virtual machine running in the cloud using the microshift user account.

Run the following command to create a new virtual machine using nested virtualization.

VMNAME=microshift-bench
ISO="/var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel-9.2-$(uname -m)-dvd.iso"

export NCPUS=2
export RAMSIZE=2
export SWAPSIZE=0
export DISKSIZE=10
export DATAVOLSIZE=1

./scripts/image-builder/manage-vm.sh config
./scripts/image-builder/manage-vm.sh create -n "${VMNAME}" -i "${ISO}"

The resources required for the automation host are relatively modest as reflected in the above commands.

Virtual Machine Management

To manage a virtual machine remotely, it is possible to use virsh command line or Cockpit Web interface running on the MicroShift development host.

However, it is recommended to use the Virtual Machine Manager application to connect to the host remotely via the File > Add Connection menu option.

From the local workstation, copy the SSH key to the microshift user account to avoid entering password in virt-viewer.

VMIPADD=34.243.184.139
ssh-copy-id microshift@${VMIPADDR}

From the remote instance, add the microshift user to the libvirt OS group to allow remote connection.

sudo usermod -a -G libvirt $(whoami)

Virtual Machine Manager Add Connection