Kubernetes Playground on your laptop

Getting started with Kubernetes on a vanilla linux installation can be overwhelming considering the number of steps and the repetitions involved in setting up master and worker nodes. In this post I intend to explain how to set up Minikube with Hyper-V on your windows 10 laptop so you can play around with it easily.

Minikube

Source: Kubernetes

Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes.

Hyper-V

Source: Wikipedia

A component of Windows Server Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian and formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor. It can create virtual machines on x86–64 systems running Windows.

Pre-requisites:

• Hyper-V : How to get Hyper-V Installed
• Chocolatey: How to install Chocolatey Package Manager

Step 1: Open Windows Power Shell with Admin Privileges ( Right Click -> Run as Administrator )

Step 2: Install the package minikube using chocolatey package manager

##Minikube has a kubernetes-cli dependency which will get auto-installed along with Minikube ##

choco install minikube

Step 4: Post Successful installation verify if your Powershell prints an output like this

Step 5: Install the Kubernetes Command Line Interface that will help you access any kubernetes cluster ( Local or otherwise )

choco install kubernetes-cli

Step 6: Change settings of Hyper-V to work around a bug of minikube.

Step 7: Open Hyper-V and go to Virtual Switch

Step 8: Click on New virtual network switch on the right hand side, select External for the network type, and then click the Create Virtual Switchbutton.

Step 9: Name the network Minikube v switch and then set it as an external network

Step 10: Run the following command in command prompt with admin privileges to start the minikube VM and configure it to be used with kubectl

minikube start --vm-driver hyperv --hyperv-virtual-switch "minikube v switch"

Step 11: Open a new command window, this time as a normal user and run the following command

kubectl get pods -n kube-system

You should see the following result

Step 12: If you are a kubernetes dashboard person, you can open that up by typing in the following command in the command line window with the same privileges that you started minikube

minikube dashboard