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Installing a cluster with the support for configuring multi-architecture compute machines

An OpenShift Container Platform cluster with multi-architecture compute machines supports compute machines with different architectures.

Note

When you have nodes with multiple architectures in your cluster, the architecture of your image must be consistent with the architecture of the node. You must ensure that the pod is assigned to the node with the appropriate architecture and that it matches the image architecture. For more information on assigning pods to nodes, see Scheduling workloads on clusters with multi-architecture compute machines.

You can install an AWS cluster with the support for configuring multi-architecture compute machines. After installing the AWS cluster, you can add multi-architecture compute machines to the cluster in the following ways:

  • Adding 64-bit x86 compute machines to a cluster that uses 64-bit ARM control plane machines and already includes 64-bit ARM compute machines. In this case, 64-bit x86 is considered the secondary architecture.

  • Adding 64-bit ARM compute machines to a cluster that uses 64-bit x86 control plane machines and already includes 64-bit x86 compute machines. In this case, 64-bit ARM is considered the secondary architecture.

Note

Before adding a secondary architecture node to your cluster, it is recommended to install the Multiarch Tuning Operator, and deploy a ClusterPodPlacementConfig custom resource. For more information, see "Managing workloads on multi-architecture clusters by using the Multiarch Tuning Operator".

Installing a cluster with multi-architecture support

You can install a cluster with the support for configuring multi-architecture compute machines.

Prerequisites

  • You installed the OpenShift CLI (oc).

  • You have the OpenShift Container Platform installation program.

  • You downloaded the pull secret for your cluster.

Procedure

  1. Check that the openshift-install binary is using the multi payload by running the following command:

    $ ./openshift-install version
    Example output
    ./openshift-install 4.21.0
built from commit abc123etc
release image quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-release@sha256:abc123wxyzetc
release architecture multi
default architecture amd64

    The output must contain release architecture multi to indicate that the openshift-install binary is using the multi payload.

  2. Update the install-config.yaml file to configure the architecture for the nodes.

    Sample install-config.yaml file with multi-architecture configuration
    apiVersion: v1
baseDomain: example.openshift.com
compute:
- architecture: amd64 
  hyperthreading: Enabled
  name: worker
  platform: {}
  replicas: 3
controlPlane:
  architecture: arm64 
  name: master
  platform: {}
  replicas: 3
# ...
    1. Specify the architecture of the worker node. You can set this field to either arm64 or amd64.
    2. Specify the control plane node architecture. You can set this field to either arm64 or amd64.
Next steps
Additional resources