Learning 1. Minikube Kubernetes Cluster Running in the Oracle VirtualBox

My learning Kubernetes Cluster is an essential skill for SRE DevOps Engineers on any Cloud platforms. My learning capability keep growing with this daily dose!! :) I like the statement given in one of the author -Kubernetes is like captain of ship where multiple container clusters carried in the huge ship. This is a first step that will help you to enter into world of Kubernetes cluster technologies. Kubernetes is also known as k8s, this is quite young technology in the DevOps stack. Here we have two options to work-out on Learning Kubernetes:

1. Kubernetes installing in master-slave in multiple nodes
2. Minikube running a locally single node

The first option will be used in real-time production environments, and the other is used for learning purposes. Here I've selected the second option for running WebLogic on Minikube.

Benefits of Kubernetes cluster

There are many benefits but in brief for WebLogic  

• Kubernetes is the core component in Cloud Native Engineering platforms
• It Will be extensively used in aws, azur and BMC (Spartacus)
• Ready to plug in real time web applications for easy deploy and scale

Running WebLogic server on Minikube Kubernetes cluster

In this article, I will be discussing 

1. How to prepare the VirtualBox for Minikube?
2. Installation of Docker CE in Ubuntu
3. Installation of Minikube in Ubuntu
4. Deploy the minikube kubernetes dashboard
5. Running WebLogic container in a pod

Prerequisites for Minikube in Ubuntu Virtual Box               

• download Oracle VirtualBox
• download Ubuntu VDI

Install the VirtualBox if it was not latest and try to launch the new Ubuntu virtual disk image. I preferred to use Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial or Ubuntu 17.10 Artful are best suites for this experiment. Select the virtual disk from  uncompressed folder. Assigned the 4Gig Ram and 2 CPUs to the VirtualBox. Start the Ubuntu 16.04 VirtualBox image, after login osboxes user. Install the Guest Additions then try to configure shared folder where you wish to store the software that shares between host machine with a guest machine. Enable the shared clipboard -> bidirectional, and also drag and drop -> bidirectional.

1. Enter into a terminal use sudo -i to switch to the root user, update the apt package index with:

 apt-get update 

2. Install packages to allow apt to use a repository over HTTPS:

 
apt-get install \
                                apt-transport-https \
                                ca-certificates \
                                curl \
                                software-properties-common

3. Add Docker’s official GPG key:

 
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add - 

4. Verify that you now have the key with the fingerprint 9DC8 5822 9FC7 DD38 854A E2D8 8D81 803C 0EBF CD88, by searching for the last 8 characters of the fingerprint.

 apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88

docker fingerprint validation in Ubuntu

Use the following command to set up the stable repository. You always need the stable repository, even if you want to install builds from the edge or test repositories as well. To add the edge or test repository, add the word edge or test (or both) after the word stable in the commands below. 5. Adding repositories for the latest stable version

 add-apt-repository \
"deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) \
stable"

Note: Starting with Docker 17.06, stable releases are also pushed to the edge and test repositories. 6. Update the apt package index.

 apt-get update

7.Install the latest version of Docker CE, or go to the next step to install a specific version:

 apt-get install docker-ce 

8. login through root check below command if running or not:

                docker version
                docker info                
 

Install minikube 

Minikube is recommended for development environments or to experience the Kubernetes in a quick way in a local VM/Laptop. Docker swarm is also a similar orchestration tool as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is open-source. Kubernetes is also supports non-docker containers such as rocket containers.

1. Firstly, download minukube and kubectl

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

Now kubectl download and move to /usr/local/bin

curl -Lo kubectl https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/$(curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl && chmod +x kubectl && cp kubectl /usr/local/bin 

2. Set the MINIKUBE Env Variables

                export MINIKUBE_WANTUPDATENOTIFICATION=false
                export MINIKUBE_WANTREPORTERRORPROMPT=false
                export MINIKUBE_HOME=$HOME
                export CHANGE_MINIKUBE_NONE_USER=true
                mkdir $HOME/.kube || true
                touch $HOME/.kube/config
                export KUBECONFIG=$HOME/.kube/config

3. Lets start the Minikube with the none driver there are multiple drivers available. Each driver works according the platform where your host machine running. So using for this experiment vm-driver=none is best suitable because it is a Virtualization of Containerization.

minikube start --vm-driver=none

We can use kubectl commands which are able to interact with Minikube cluster. If you get any issue related to certs. The fix will be simply stop the minikube and start it.

Understanding kubernetes Head Node

 Minikube internally runs Kubernetes Head node or some other says that Master node, the whole control will be operated from this node only, which contains all components:

1. etcd
2. scheduler
3. controller
4. apiserver
5. addons-manager

All the component required for Head node we can see in the namespace list:

kubectl get po --all-namespaces

Head node work with the set of namespaces

Kubelet is a Kubernetes Node agent which will be always running and monitoring all the components. If anything goes down it will brings up that component service automatically.

The etcd is capable to store the key, values which are used in the Kubernetes cluster. It is developed and inspired from coreos.

Every Kubernetes master will have scheduler, that is actually used to triggered as per the start time value, by default it will be 0.

Kuberneretes master have controller which internally talks to docker environment and a kubelet. Kubelet is like running an agent for Kubernetes master.The internal communication will be using RSA certs.

The apiserver in the master will be serving the client requests and they will be routed to the available Nodes. A Node may have multiple pods of same category.

Think Differently

Using minikube dashboard to deploy WebLogic Console application where many thousands of examples are there to tell hello-world app but say think differently web application that is WebLogic administration console as app to deploy as service and name it as wls-app.

Minikube Kubernetes will be providing us a nice UI dashboard to show the workload on the cluster. What all the status of pods, services, and also allows use to create and manage the deployments etc.

Let's start the dashboard

minikube dashboard

when you run the above command it will try to launch the browser and start the dashboard

Minikube dashboard

Finally stopping the minikube

minikube stop
Stopping local Kubernetes cluster...
Machine stopped.

Next post 

Learning 2: MiniKube Kubernetes Cluster WebLogic Application deployment

Hoping you like this experiment trick. please share this with your techie friends, share your comments.

5. docker-compose for WebLogic cluster deployment

In the earlier post you have seen how to use docker-compose for WebLogic images to build and also run the container with new application deployment. In this post you will be able to see the WebLogic managed servers forms cluster and the application will be deployed on top of it.

Prerequisites

Let me keep the list of prerequisite steps which you can follow my previous blog post or youtube video.

1.  docker pull oraclelinux:7-slim  
2. git clone https://github.com/oracle/docker-images.git 
3. download server-jre1.8 latest version copy to OracleJava/dockerfiles build the image and make it as oracle/serverjre:8
4. download weblogic 12.2.1.2.0 quick installer which is used for development, it is small in size. image name it as oracle/weblogic:12.2.1.2-developer 
5.  create new docker images where 12212-domain:latest using WLST and shell script which are available in container scripts. 
6. create new docker images named as 1221-appdeploy:latest where it uses 12212-domain as base images. 
7. And also docker pull httpd:2.4 6. download the proxy plugin for 12.2.1.2 create the 1221-webtier:latest [apache with proxy plugin configured]

The power of docker-compose script

Now lets pick the following docker-compose.yml file where it will use two images the two images : 1221-appdeploy, 1221-webtier Using last session created admin container for create managedserver with port change

version: '2'

networks:
  &network wlsnet:
    driver: bridge

services:

  # Deploys the wlsServer with default hostname 'wlsadmin' used by scripts in 1221-domain.
  &adm adminserver:
    image: &i 1221-appdeploy
    container_name: wlsadmin
    ports:
    - "8001:7001"
    networks:
      - *network

  # Deploys a container running a Managed Server and a Node Manager to control MS from wlsServer
  managedserver:
    image: *i
    command: createServer.sh
    networks:
      - *network
    depends_on:
      - *adm

  # Deploys a container running only a node manager. to deploy a managed server here later, use wlsServer Web Console
  nodemanager:
    image: *i
    command: createMachine.sh
    networks:
      - *network
    depends_on:
      - *adm

 # WebTier for load balancing requests to cluster
  webtier:
    image: 1221-webtier
    networks:
      - *network
    ports:
    - "8800:80"
    environment:
      - WEBLOGIC_CLUSTER="managedserver:7001"
    links:
      - managedserver

################ END OF compose file ###############################

Next steps

8. Validate the docker configuration syntax docker-compose config
9. If all good then proceed for the run the containers - wlsadmin, managedserver, nodemanager and webtier docker-compose up
10.  Check the containers logs with container names as argument docker-compose ps docker logs wlscluster_managedserver_1 -f
 11. Expansion of docker containers for clustered Weblogic domain. docker-compose scale managedserver=4


We will be more happy to help you for your dockerization of WebLogic environments.

References:

• docker-compose cheat sheet

4.Learning docker-compose for WebLogic with examples

Learning docker-compose for WebLogic with examples

The docker-compose is one of the docker integration tool. it works based on yml or yaml file. The yml files are easy to read plain like English text. It is developed alternative to JSON files, both are used to store the key, value pairs and hierarchical structured data. To run docker-compose command in the current directory there should be  docker-compose.yml file must be exist.

Prerequisites for docker-compose

• well awareness of docker
• YML syntax
• docker network

docker-compose build with Example

Dockerfile is used to build the docker image that should be present in the current directory.

Create docker-compose.yml file

Lets create the docker-compose.yml file for WebLogic Domain container which uses 1221-appdeploy image. The AdminServer port exposed as 7001 from the container and on left side host port opened with 7001. The container should run the command/shell script. here we can select startWebLogic.sh as starting shell script to be executed when container launched.

Here the docker Compose syntax is simple human readable. alternative to JSON. meta-data.

wls:
 image: 1221-appdeploy
 ports:
  - "7001:7001"
 command:
  - startWebLogic.sh

Now we are ready for Running the container with docker-compose command which will start the container and keep  it running state.

docker-compose up 

To run the docker container in the background we will use -d option

docker-compose up -d 

docker-compose for WebLogic appdeployment container

We have same number of commands as in docker for docker-compose. And it is more powerful than docker commands. because it can start multiple containers with single command.

How to check the WebLogic log files from docker host?

Docker container logs can be viewed from the docker host machine using the following command

  docker-compose logs --tail="all"

  docker-compose logs -f
   

How to get docker-compose process list?

We can get the list of process that are running on docker deamon.

docker-compose ps

docker-compose ps for WebLogic

How to bring down docker-compose containers?

To stop the container we can use stop option

docker-compose stop

To destroy and dispose you can use down option.

docker-compose down

It will stop and remove the container.

Destroying the container will loss all the changes in the last domain configuration. Better to have host volume shared or have a separate container to have WebLogic domains for backup.

1. Learning dockerization for WebLogic on Oracle Linux in Vagrant

Writing this blog post after couple of executions experiments and research on docker. The basic requirement for docker is there must be a Linux/Unix based platform. Here I am creating that one on my Windows host machine, and the guest Ubuntu Trusty64 platform with the help of Vagrant and Oracle Virtualbox provider.

vagrant Ubuntu docker - Oracle Linux images

In this Article I am not dicuss about from the scratch What is docker etc. I'm not talking about Virtualization vs Containerization.
Create testnode1 folder on the Windows machine. I've created on F:\testnode1.

The Vagrantfile to launch Ubuntu Trusty64 Virtual machine is as follows:

Vagrantfile

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.define "test" do |testnode1|
 testnode1.vm.box = "williamyeh/ubuntu-trusty64-docker"
 testnode1.vm.hostname="testnode1.vybhava.com"
 testnode1.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.102"
  end
  config.vm.synced_folder "F:/Softwares", "/u01/app/software"
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
     vb.memory = "4096"
   end
 end

After Vagrant up looks like this

In the Trusty64 terminal the createuser.sh shell script will be executed first time. Next time onwards it will verify and shows message already executed.

Note that this vagrant box built-in with docker, and when you start the box it will automatically brings up the docker-engine.

How do I know docker installed?

Using docker info you will get to know about the docker version, status and information about daemon how much memory, CPU are allotted for it.

docker info

The docker info command execution

How do I check docker engine running?

Using regular Linux service command will tell about docker engine. Of-course docker info already tells the same in one of the line.

service docker status

Checking docker service status

Lets do dockerization

There are multiple docker commands which help you to create docker images, pull them from the global repository. Docker images will be used to generate docker containers. Here image is like blueprint and the container is like object of the blueprint.

docker search oraclelinux

docker search for oraclelinux image in public registry

Once you found your desired image then you can use pull command on docker engine then docker image will be visible.

docker pull oraclelinux7

docker pull oraclelinux-7

After pull successful your docker images stack will be updated to check use docker images command.

docker images

docker images list including oraclelinux-7

Running docker container
We can run the docker container from the pulled images, here we are interested on oraclelinux-7 image.

 docker run -i -t --name orawls --hostname orawls.vybhava.com dnraikes/oraclelinux-7:latest /bin/bash

Next post on Java WebLogic in docker image

Configure a WebLogic Server Background Service

server running in the background which is very much required in Production and Test Environments where your operating platform is Windows NT based. Whenever the Windows server is rebooted the WebLogic Admin server or Managed servers running on it are going to started automatically, when they are configured with windows ‘services’.

1. Use WebLogic existing Domain or Create a Domain for testing 
2. Create a installation Script per WebLogic server such as AdminServer or Managed Server
3. Create a .cmd let us workout per AdminServer  with the following  Open notepad or any editor to write the following Windows batch Script
   
   

   echo off
   SETLOCAL
   set DOMAIN_NAME=demoDomain                          
   set USERDOMAIN_HOME=F:\irfan\demoDomain  
   set SERVER_NAME=AdminServer         
   call "F:\Oracle\wlserver\server\bin\installSvc.cmd"    
   ENDLOCAL
   

   
   Write the above code and SAVE it with ‘AdminServerSrv.cmd’ in your domain\bin
4. open a new CMD prompt with Admin permissions.
5. Window button + R will give you program that to run “Services.msc”

Upto the WebLogic 10.3.6 it was beasvc binary now it is changed in the WebLogic 12c it is wlsvc file. This will be invoked by installSvc.cmd file. Once the WebLogic server is started in the Operating system services then it will be give access through the Admin Console that you usually use http://adminhost:adminport/console.

Uninstalling the WebLogic server from windows Service

Step 1: Open one more edit window or notepad write the following script commands using “unintallSvc.cmd”

echo off
SETLOCAL
set DOMAIN_NAME=demoDomain                                
set USERDOMAIN_HOME=F:\irfan\demoDomain       
set SERVER_NAME=AdminServer       
call "F:\Oracle\wlserver\server\bin\uninstallSvc.cmd"    
ENDLOCAL