Updated: 5/26/2020

This guide is deprecated. Please use the new guide for OKD 4.5 at https://medium.com/@craig_robinson/guide-installing-an-okd-4-5-cluster-508a2631cbee

OKD is the upstream and community-supported version of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). OpenShift expands vanilla Kubernetes into an application platform designed for enterprise use at scale. Starting with the release of OpenShift 4, the default operating system is Red Hat CoreOS, which provides an immutable infrastructure and automated updates. Fedora CoreOS, like OKD, is the upstream version of Red Hat CoreOS.

For those of you who have a Home Lab, you can gain some experience with OpenShift by using the open-source upstream combination of OKD and FCOS (Fedora CoreOS) to build your own cluster.

Experience is an excellent way to learn new technologies. Used hardware for a home lab that could run an OKD cluster is relatively inexpensive these days ($250–$350), especially when compared to a cloud-hosted solution costing over $250 per month.

The purpose of this guide is to help you successfully build an OKD 4.4 cluster at home that you can take for a test drive. VMWare is the example hypervisor used in this guide, but you could use Hyper-V, libvirt, VirtualBox, bare metal, or other platforms.

This guide assumes you have a virtualization platform, basic knowledge of Linux, and the ability to Google.

Note: In this tutorial, I use a 192.168.1.0/24 network for OKD. If you already use 192.168.1.0/24 be sure to use a different IP scheme for your OKD environment. An alternate network would be 192.168.100.0/24 for example.