Install Openshift on Windows (2024)

In this demo we will see how to set up a Openshift environment for development and testing purposes using Minishift.

To get started, go to the Minishift Website under Get Started section at https://docs.okd.io/3.11/minishift/getting-started/index.html

Click on Installation Document, here you can find basic information on getting started with Minishift. As you can see Minishift can be run on Windows Mac OS and Linux platforms. So Minishift requires a hypervisor and the one that works on all platforms happens to be VirtualBox which is what we will be using for this demo.

If you have not set up VirtualBox yet click on the link to go to the VirtualBox download page and download the respective version for your operating system. For this demo, will select Windows hosts.

Follow through the wizard to complete installation.
Once installation is complete, you can see the Virtual Box as shown.

The next step is to download the Minishift utility as seen in the Web site Minishift Releases download the minishift utility from the releases page by clicking on this link. Download the appropriate version (minishift-1.34.3-windows-amd64.zip) for your platform and extract it to a folder.

In this demo, we are using Windows platform, so will move the folder to C drive because that is where my virtual box is installed and configured.

Once there open a command prompt and navigate to the folder containing Minishift executable and then it is as simple as executing the Minishift.exe start command to bring up the cluster.

Command:

minishift.exe start --vm-driver virtualbox

--vm-driver virtualbox : As we are using Windows platform, Minishift defaults to using Hyper-V for deploying the minishift virtual machine. So point minishift to use Virtual Box instead by providing the VM driver virtual box option.

When above command runs minishift goes out to the Internet pulls down the ISO image and creates a virtual machine on Virtual Box which can be seen on the below image. Once completed, it give URL to access the Openshift web console as well as instructions to access the command line using the oc tool.

A new VM by the name minishift is automatically created. Start minishift as given below in the screen.

If you face below issue while starting the minishift, follow this link to Fix VM VirtualBox Error- VT x is disabled in the BIOS for all CPU modes (ALL-VMX-DISABLED)

Use the above URL as highlighted in command prompt, visit local openshift page, use username as given "developer" and any password (you can provide any password, as password is not validated.) OR for administrator use username provided as system and password as admin.

We now have a working Openshift cluster to play around with.

We will explore more of the web console and CLI in later sections of this tutorial.