Installing Minikube on Windows

Introduction

In the previous blog, we looked at installing Minikube on Linux. In this blog we will install Minikube on a Windows machine. To my surprise installation has been dead easy as in the case of Linux.

Installing Minikube on Windows

• Install VirtualBox as mentioned here. The blog is somewhat old, but the instructions are more or less the same for installing VirtualBox.

• Install Chocolatey which is a Package Manager for Windows using the instruction here. From here on Chocolatey can be used to install/update/delete Minikube. It's some what similar to apt and yum in the Linux environments. I have done the same using PowerShell, but the same can be done using the command prompt also.

• Now it's time to install Minikube as mentioned here, we will use Chocolatey for the same. The 'choco install minikube' command will install Minikube and not the VM in VirtualBox.

• Now is the time to run 'minikube start' command. This will download/configure the K8S VM, log into the VM and start a few services and also setup kubectl on the host to point towards the VM. Although the VM has started, the status in VirtualBox is shown as 'Powered Off'. Not sure why.

 

• Login into the VM using the 'minikube ssh' command and issue the 'sudo init 0' to terminate the VM. Run the 'minikube start' command to start the VM again.

Conclusion

In the earlier blog, we installed minikube on Linux and this time on a Windows machine. In both the cases it runs a Linux OS in VirtualBox and so only a Linux container can be run on Minikube, but still we would be able to learn many aspects of K8S. In the upcoming blogs, we will look at the different concepts around K8S and try them out.

In the upcoming blog, we will explore running a Windows container obviously on Windows OS.