Qubinode Overview

A Qubinode is a bare metal node that uses the qubinode-installer to configure RHEL to function as a KVM host. The qubinode-installer can then be used to deploy additional Red Hat products as VMs running atop the Qubinode.

Getting Started

The first step is to get RHEL installed on your hardware

Get Subscriptions

Get your No-cost developer subscription for RHEL.
Get a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) 60-day evalution subscription.

Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux

A bare metal system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Follow the RHEL Installation Walkthrough to get RHEL installed on your hardware. When installing RHEL, for the software selection, Base Environment choose one of the following:

Virtualization Host
Server with GUI

If you choose Server with GUI, make sure from the Add-ons for Selected Evironment you select the following:

Virtualization Hypervisor
Virtualization Tools

TIPS

If using the recommend storage of one ssd and one NVME, install RHEL on the ssd, not the NVME.

The RHEL installer will delicate the majority of your storage to /home, you can choose “I will configure partitioning” to have control over this.

Set root password and create admin user with sudo privilege

The qubinode-installer

Downlaod and extract the qubinode-installer as a non root user.

cd $HOME
wget https://github.com/Qubinode/qubinode-installer/archive/main.zip
unzip main.zip
rm main.zip
mv qubinode-installer-main qubinode-installer

Qubinode Setup

The below commands ensure your system is setup as a KVM host. The qubinode-installer needs to run as a regular user.

setup - ensure your username is setup for sudoers
rhsm - ensure your rhel system is registered to Red Hat
ansible - ensure your rhel system is setup for to function as a ansible controller
host - ensure your rhel system is setup as a KVM host

Go here for additional qubinode options.

./qubinode-installer -m setup
./qubinode-installer -m rhsm
./qubinode-installer -m ansible
./qubinode-installer -m host

At this point you should be able to acces the RHEL system via the cockpit web interface on:

https://SERVER_IP:9090

Deploy a Red Hat Product

Most products depends on the latest rhel 7 or 8 qcow image. You can either manually download them or provide your RHSM api token and the installer will download these files for you.

Getting the RHEL 7 Qcow Image

Using Token	Downloading
Navigate to RHSM API to generate a token and save it as rhsm_token. This token will be used to download the rhel qcow image.	From your web browser, navigate to Download Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Download the qcow image matching this checksum the below checksum.

Follow the same steps to get the RHEL 8 qcow image.

If you are using tokens it should be:

* $HOME/qubinode-installer/rhsm_token

If you downloaded the files instead, confirm that the project directory list the qcow images below or later versions:

* $HOME/qubinode-installer/rhel-server-7.8-x86_64-kvm.qcow2
* $HOME/qubinode-installer/rhel-8.2-x86_64-kvm.qcow2

At this point you refer to the documentation for the product you want to install.

The Qubinode Insaller