Provisioning a Demonstration Environment

The subsequent sections of this lab will utilize three instances of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Cluster:

  1. Demo Cluster: for running the model training and deployment exercises

  2. Dev Cluster: to simulate a development OpenShift cluster

  3. Prod Cluster: to simulate a production OpenShift cluster

In this section we will order all three clusters at demo.redhat.com. Note that these clusters are fairly short lived, typically they have a 6 hour runtime and are deleted after 48 hours, although the runtime can be temporarily extended as needed.

The demo clusters typically take 1-2 hours to provision, although they may take a little longer on Monday mornings as they are using AWS spot instances and demand is usually high at the start of the work week. So it’s suggested to provision them, and continue with the subsequent sections that don’t require cluster access yet.

Provision the Demo Cluster

The first cluster where we will run our demonstration projects requires a little more resources that the other two, so lets provision this first.

  1. Navigate to demo.redhat.com and select the AWS with OpenShift Open Environment. Note that this is a blank / empty instance of OpenShift with no other operators or demo components preloaded, perfect for our lab exercise.

  2. Change the the Control Plane Instance Type to m6a.4xlarge, as the default machine configuration does not have sufficient compute resources for the additional component we will be installing.

  3. You should be able to use the default version of OpenShift, however since there are continuous releases it’s a good idea to double check the RHOAI Documentation, under the Supported configurations subsection to ensure compatibility.

As of Nov 22, 2024 the Node Feature Discovery and NVIDIA Operator appear to be broken on the latest version of OpenShift (4.17), be sure to use 4.16 when building a cluster so that the taints and tolerations work correctly. This may be fixed by Red Hat Engineering soon, so this warning can be removed when the operators are compatible with latest OCP.
OrderAWS env

Provision the Development and Production Clusters

These are simple clusters used to demonstrate Kustomize overlays in a subsequent lab. One cluster will be used for the Dev environment and the other for the Prod environment.

  1. Navigate to demo.redhat.com and order the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Cluster (AWS)

  2. Select all default configuration options

  3. Repeat these steps twice, one for Dev and the next for Prod clusters

clustersettings Dev Prod

While You Wait

The provisioning process will take a while to complete, so why not take some time to check out some of the documentation in the AI Accelerator project that we will be bootstrapping, once the new clusters are ready:

When the Cluster is Ready

Once the clusters have been provisioned, you should receive an email containing the cluster URLs as well as an administrative user (such as kubeadmin) and password.

You can also obtain these URLs and credentials from your services dashboard at demo.redhat.com. The dashboard also allows you to perform administrative functions on your clusters, such as starting/stopping or extending the lifespan if desired.

Questions for Further Consideration

Additional questions that could be discussed for this topic:

  1. How long can we use the demo.redhat.com OpenShift cluster? When will it get deleted?

  2. I want to install a demonstration cluster that might last several months for a RHOAI evaluation period. What options are available?

  3. Can we use our own AWS based OpenShift cluster, other than one from demo.redhat.com?

  4. Could I install this on my own hardware, such as my desktop PC that is running a single node OpenShift cluster?

  5. The topic of being able to easily repeat an installation, as discussed in the following GitOps sections may be interesting to discuss, since this means that work done to configure an environment is not lost if the environment is destroyed.