Let’s face it, the cloud is too expensive for OpenShift enthusiasts to set up a test OpenShift environment. Used hardware for a home lab that could run an OCP cluster among other things is relatively inexpensive these days, $250–$350, especially when compared to a cloud-hosted solution costing over $250 per month. The way many of us learn is through experience and with using home labs we can learn new technologies by installing, breaking, and fixing them ourselves.

Before deploying several OpenShift 3.11 clusters in a production environment, I perfected my playbooks and deployments in a home lab using the upstream version, OKD (previously known as origin). The amount of knowledge I gained by building, tearing down, and rebuilding the cluster several times has been valuable and has since been used that experience to solve production issues. When I found out in October of 2018 that OpenShift 4 was built following an immutable infrastructure principal and that when combined with CoreOS OpenShift offered OTA like updates, I was all in.

It has taken some time, but I have succeeded in building an OpenShift 4.x OKD cluster in my home lab. It can be difficult and overwhelming to design an architecture in your home lab specifically for ODK. Fortunately, I was able to come up with a design that worked and I would like to share the process with others.

Note: At the time of writing OKD is in preview and is still a work in progress so expect bugs and workarounds.

Screenshot from github.com/openshift/okd

This guide assumes you have a VMWare host, Linux terminal (Ubuntu Terminal, putty, or similar for Windows users), basic knowledge of Linux, the ability to Google, and a separate network that is not 192.168.1.0/24.

Note: If you are already using a 192.168.1.0/24 network, be sure to use a different IP scheme for your OKD environment.