Cloud in a Box: OpenShift Online in VirtualBox (Tech Tip #46)

OpenShift is Red Hat’s PaaS platform and comes in three flavors:

• Origin is the Community PaaS offering. You can explore the community-driven open source upstream of OpenShift. Join the community.
• Online is the Public PaaS offering. Host your applications in the public cloud with automated provisioning, management, and scaling of applications. Sign up for free.
• Enterprise is the Private PaaS offering. Leverage PaaS in your own data centers and private cloud. Request evaluation.

This Tech Tip will show how you can setup a Virtual VM running with OpenShift Online. Instructions at openshift.github.io/documentation/oo_deployment_guide_vm.html are pretty self explanatory. Here are the exact ones that I followed on Mavericks:

1. Download VM:

   curl -O https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/origin-server/release/4/images/openshift-origin.tgz

2. Unpack VM files

   tar xzvf ~/Downloads/openshift-origin.tgz 
   x OpenShift Origin v4/
   x OpenShift Origin v4/OpenShift Origin v4.nvram
   x OpenShift Origin v4/OpenShift Origin v4.vbox
   x OpenShift Origin v4/OpenShift Origin v4.vmsd
   x OpenShift Origin v4/OpenShift Origin v4.vmx
   x OpenShift Origin v4/OpenShift Origin v4.vmxf
   x OpenShift Origin v4/._origin-vm.vmdk
   x OpenShift Origin v4/origin-vm.vmdk

3. Follow the instructions to create a VirtualBox instance. Create a new hard drive using the unzipped origin-vm.vmdk file.

   IMPORTANT: Instead of 4.2.4 to add bridged networking, setup a host-only network using 4.2.5.

4. Boot the VM to see the output as:

   

   Type “5” to exit to the command prompt.

5. VM comes pre-configured with Avahi DNS service and so now you can access OpenShift console at broker.openshift.local and seen as:

   

   The username/password are “demo”/”changeme”.

6. Create an SSH tunnel into the VM as:

   ssh -f root@broker.openshift.local -L 8080:localhost:8080 -N

   Password is “changeme”. OpenShift admin console is now accessible at localhost:8080/admin-console and looks like:

   

   More details about Admin Console are well documented.

Many thanks to Harrison for guiding me through creating this process!

Ask your OpenShift questions at stackoverflow or follow them at @openshift.

Enjoy!