vSphere cloud provider

Kubespray can be deployed with vSphere as Cloud provider. This feature supports

  • Volumes
  • Persistent Volumes
  • Storage Classes and provisioning of volumes.
  • vSphere Storage Policy Based Management for Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Prerequisites

You need at first to configure your vSphere environment by following the official documentation.

After this step you should have:

  • UUID activated for each VM where Kubernetes will be deployed
  • A vSphere account with required privileges

If you intend to leverage the zone and region node labeling, create a tag category for both the zone and region in vCenter. The tags can then be applied at the host, cluster, datacenter, or folder level, and the cloud provider will walk the hierarchy to extract and apply the labels to the Kubernetes nodes.

Kubespray configuration

First you must define the cloud provider in inventory/sample/group_vars/all.yml and set it to vsphere.

  1. cloud_provider: vsphere

Then, in the same file, you need to declare your vCenter credential following the description below.

Variable Required Type Choices Default Comment
vsphere_vcenter_ip TRUE string IP/URL of the vCenter
vsphere_vcenter_port TRUE integer Port of the vCenter API. Commonly 443
vsphere_insecure TRUE integer 1, 0 set to 1 if the host above uses a self-signed cert
vsphere_user TRUE string User name for vCenter with required privileges
vsphere_password TRUE string Password for vCenter
vsphere_datacenter TRUE string Datacenter name to use
vsphere_datastore TRUE string Datastore name to use
vsphere_working_dir TRUE string Working directory from the view “VMs and template” in the vCenter where VM are placed
vsphere_scsi_controller_type TRUE string buslogic, pvscsi, parallel pvscsi SCSI controller name. Commonly “pvscsi”.
vsphere_vm_uuid FALSE string VM Instance UUID of virtual machine that host K8s master. Can be retrieved from instanceUuid property in VmConfigInfo, or as vc.uuid in VMX file or in /sys/class/dmi/id/product_serial (Optional, only used for Kubernetes <= 1.9.2)
vsphere_public_network FALSE string Blank Name of the network the VMs are joined to
vsphere_resource_pool FALSE string Blank Name of the Resource pool where the VMs are located (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.9.2)
vsphere_zone_category FALSE string Name of the tag category used to set the failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone label on nodes (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.12.0)
vsphere_region_category FALSE string Name of the tag category used to set the failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/region label on nodes (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.12.0)

Example configuration

  1. vsphere_vcenter_ip: "myvcenter.domain.com"
  2. vsphere_vcenter_port: 443
  3. vsphere_insecure: 1
  4. vsphere_user: "k8s@vsphere.local"
  5. vsphere_password: "K8s_admin"
  6. vsphere_datacenter: "DATACENTER_name"
  7. vsphere_datastore: "DATASTORE_name"
  8. vsphere_working_dir: "Docker_hosts"
  9. vsphere_scsi_controller_type: "pvscsi"
  10. vsphere_resource_pool: "K8s-Pool"

Deployment

Once the configuration is set, you can execute the playbook again to apply the new configuration

  1. cd kubespray
  2. ansible-playbook -i inventory/sample/hosts.ini -b -v cluster.yml

You’ll find some useful examples here to test your configuration.