--- # Documenting the Experience: Moving Crunchtools to Containers/OpenShift: Part 1 **URL:** https://crunchtools.com/crunchtools-moving-to-containers-openshift/ Date: 2017-03-13 Author: fatherlinux Post Type: post Summary: Background Last week, I was in Westford, MA for an engineering meeting. I was chatting with one of our Base Runtime engineers Petr Sabata, and an interesting subject came up. He joked, “I understand containers, I know how to use them, but I still haven’t converted any of *my* services to containers.” This got me<p class="excert-link-wrapper"><a href="https://crunchtools.com/crunchtools-moving-to-containers-openshift/" class="excerpt-more-link" >Continue Reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> "Documenting the Experience: Moving Crunchtools to Containers/OpenShift: Part 1"</span><span class="meta-nav"> →</span></a></p> Categories: Articles Tags: Container Engines, OpenShift, RHEL Featured Image: https://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Crunchtools-layer-1.png --- ## Background Last week, I was in Westford, MA for an engineering meeting. I was chatting with one of our Base Runtime engineers [Petr Sabata](https://www.linkedin.com/in/petrsabata/), and an interesting subject came up. He joked, "I understand containers, I know how to use them, but I still haven't converted any of *my* services to containers." This got me to thinking - you know what - I haven't converted any of *my* services either. Like any former systems administrator, I run my personal setup like a data center - I have instances of Mediawiki, Wordpress, Request Tracker, Subversion (server), Nagios, Cacti, and a bunch of other supporting services running in [four different geographic locations](http://crunchtools.com/crunchtools-lab-environment/). All of it's monitored, and I get paged if something is down (I just can't let go :-P). For all intents and purposes, this stuff is production. If my ticket system or wiki is down, I am dead in the water. This makes these services very sensitive to move. I need to make sure I figure out the big stuff like backup/restore, monitoring.data acquisition, updates as well as simple things like, how does an administrator do the equivalent of extending an LV when it's mounted on a PV in OpenShift?  To be very honest, every time I plan to migrate, I get road blocked at some point. ## ## And So It Begins This weekend, I got motivated - my three node OpenShift 3.4 installation is now up and running. I threw caution to the wind, dove in. I am well aware that I ignored some of the best practices to get this thing installed and running, so please don't judge me :-) I started by getting three instances of RHEL 7.3 running in Linode. This took some hacking because RHEL is not supported on Linode. You have to [build your own image](https://www.linode.com/docs/migrate-to-linode/disk-images/copying-a-disk-image-over-ssh). Then, I troubleshot some strange things like network interfaces being recognized as eth0 on one server, but esn3 on the others. After the lower level stuff was solved, I got the container runtime installed and configured. I am just using device mapper loop deviceS for now because of resource constraints in Linode (I know, I know, [bad](http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2015/06/notes-on-fedora-centos-and-docker-storage-drivers/)....). Ignoring the [minimum requirements](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/openshift_container_platform/3.4/html/installation_and_configuration/installing-a-cluster#system-requirements), I then got OpenShift installed, up and running. For those that want to see the commands I used, here is the [pastebin of the commands](http://pastebin.com/26yHSHfy). ![](http://crunchtools.com/files/2012/09/Crunchtools-Nagios-300x168.png) Finally, you will notice, I prepped everything manually. This is because my standard operating environment for years has been built with Satellite and Puppet. Well, my Satellite server is dead (cascading failures) and I want to convert to Ansible. So, I am collecting all of the operations that I will need first, and I will automate later. This is a standard pattern, and anybody that says automate first, doesn't understand engineering and ROI. Experiment, experiment, then build automation. I wrote a three part article about how to do real engineering explaining [documentation and automation](http://crunchtools.com/bootstrapping-and-rooting-documentation-part-1/) Yes, you *still* and *always* need to document the entry point into automation and how to commit changes to it. This is basically the root of why S3 failed a couple weeks back - people aren't careful with the entry point into automation and destroy things, much faster. But, I digress.     ## Conclusion Well, stay tuned over the coming weeks as I tackle each of the necessary technical requirements to run containers in production. First, I need to figure out how I will architect my projects in OpenShift and how I will build my image layers to support all of the different applications which I have. After that, I will start migrating services along with all of their supporting functions like backups, monitoring, data acquisition. Nagios and Cacti going to be interesting considering it has always been a CPU hog and will probably need broken apart somehow. The goal is to not get into some cascading chaos where I pick all new services just because I am moving to containers. There is the engineering desire to check out something like Zabbix, etc, but I will attempt to change as little as possible because these are the constraints of real operations people at real companies. --- ## Categories - Articles --- ## Navigation - [Home](https://crunchtools.com/) - [Articles](https://crunchtools.com/category/articles/) - [Events](https://crunchtools.com/category/events/) - [News](https://crunchtools.com/category/news/) - [Presentations](https://crunchtools.com/category/presentations/) - [Software](https://crunchtools.com/software/) - [Beaver Backup](https://crunchtools.com/software/beaver-backup/) - [Check BGP Neighbors](https://crunchtools.com/software/check-bgp-neighbors-nagios/) - [Chev](https://crunchtools.com/software/chev-check-vulnerabilities-script/) - [Graph BGP Neighbors](https://crunchtools.com/software/grpah-bgp-neighbors/) - [Graph MySQL Stats](https://crunchtools.com/software/graph-mysql-stats/) - [Graph Sockets Pipes Files](https://crunchtools.com/software/graph-sockets-pipes-files/) - [MCP Servers](https://crunchtools.com/software/mcp-servers/) - [Petit](https://crunchtools.com/software/petit/) - [Racecar](https://crunchtools.com/software/racecar/) - [Shiva](https://crunchtools.com/software/shiva/) - [About](https://crunchtools.com/about/) - [Home](https://crunchtools.com) ## Tags - Container Engines - OpenShift - RHEL