Activating OpenShift environments

This topic describes how to activate an environment to use for Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW) Private Cloud on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).

Before you can create a Database Catalog to use with a Virtual Warehouse, you must activate a CDP environment. Activating an environment causes CDP to connect to the Kubernetes cluster, which provides the computing resources for the Database Catalog. In addition, activating an environment enables the Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW) service to use the existing data lake that was set up for the environment, including all data, metadata, and security.

  • Determine which environment that uses a particular data lake is the environment you want to activate for use with a Database Catalog and Virtual Warehouse.
  • For local caching, ensure that an administrator uses the Local Storage Operator to create a local file system on an SSD/NVMe for each OpenShift worker node and then mounts it to a known location on the worker node. Make sure that this local caching location allows temporary data to be stored in a way that supports performance. You need to specify the Storage Class Name from the Local Storage Operator when you activate the environment for the CDW service in Step 4 below. For more information about creating a local file system on OpenShift worker nodes using the Local Storage Operator, see Persistent storage using local volumes in the OpenShift documentation.
  • (Optional) Go to Advanced Configuration > Advanced Settings and enable the Use deterministic namespace names option to use deterministic namespaces for Kerberos principals and keytabs. You cannot enable this option after activating an environment.
  • (Optional) Go to Advanced Configuration > Advanced Settings and enable the Create databases for Virtual Warehouses option if you are upgrading the CDP Private Cloud Data Services platform from an older release to the latest release, and you want to continue using external database for Hue and HMS. You cannot enable this option after activating an environment.
  1. Log in to Data Warehouse service as DWAdmin.
  2. Expand the Environments column by clicking Moreā€¦ and locate the Environment that you want to activate.
  3. Click the activation icon.
    The Activate Environment dialog box is displayed.


  4. Specify the Storage Class Name from Local Storage Operator:

    This is the Storage Class Name you specified when you created the local file system for caching as described in the above section Before you begin. It is the location where temporary data is stored.

    Optionally, you can specify the Security Context Constraint Name.

  5. Specify Delegation Username and Delegation Password to impersonate authorization requests from Hue to the Impala engine.
  6. Optional: Enable low resource mode to deploy CDW on minimum hardware.
  7. If you are using an external database on your base cluster and want to use a default Database Catalog, then you must specify custom database name for Hue in the Pre-created database names for default database catalog field.
  8. Optional: Select KERBEROS from the Hive Authentication Mode drop-down menu to use Kerberos as the authentication mode for Hive Virtual Warehouses.
    The default authentication mode is LDAP.
  9. Click ACTIVATE.