It supports declarative configuration, powerful automation, and has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem. Its good to understand how everything is put together and how they all interact. You can use kubectl to manage your Kubernetes environment on the command line just as you would in any type of Kubernetes environment. Such containers can be accessible through a vSphere Pod Service in Kubernetes. Please see https://www.vrealize.it/2021/01/08/vsphere-with-tanzu-with-nsx-t-medium-sized-edge/ for the additional instructions. Thats useful for use cases that require a high degree of security and privacy.
As I dont want to re-write the VMware configuration guides, I wont go in great details, but I will summarize the steps and the challenges I went through (I learned!) But in that case, your VMs end up being part of your Kubernetes cluster rather than running alongside it. Kubernetes is an open-source project. The first step is to list out the LBs which you can do so with the following command and replacing the credentials of your NSX-T Manager as well as the FQDN. I'm looking to enable Kubernetes in vSphere 7.0 in my physical homelab, do you have a sense of when VMUG will make available the vSphere Enterprise Plus with Add-on for Kubernetes license? The certSANs: this is the certificate Subject Alternate Names. You have to change certain properties on the virtual machines that are used in the cluster. It seems that the files are not available anymore. They dont need direct access to or knowledge of the vSphere APIs, clients, or infrastructure because they use the industry-standard Kubernetes syntax. It has a huge and fast-expanding ecosystem. Whats more, as we show below, VMware provides a simple and automated process for provisioning that infrastructure into workload domains that can host a cluster. If you are not using a Large NSX-T Edge, you may not be able to deploy additional applications and/or deploy a TKG Cluster. With the resources of a Medium NSX-T Edge, you can have up to 10 Small LBs and 1 Medium LB. In order to change both, you can do it in the UI, but I preferred to script everything. Any chance a minimal install could work on a NUC Skull Canyon with 32GB memory? Kubernetes on prior versions do not work. Anyone got it running with the nsx t 3.1 limited export version? You wont need to install components on VMs manually; VMware handles the tedious work for you. The Kubernetes API, as well as the Spherelet, a management agent based on the Kubernetes Kubelet, are now included in the ESXi hypervisor, which is at the heart of vSphere. At this point, all the masters should be configured. Some, as weve noted, run only in certain public clouds. You can find the file here. Great post William! It is heavily API-driven, making it an ideal tool for automation. I'm having a few problems getting it to work, but am not sure what the cause is. UPDATE (01/08/21) - As of NSX-T 3.1, there are some additional changes required to reduce the size of the LBs. It handles load balancing and NAT as part of this process. With that said, you can play with vSphere with Kubernetes with just vSphere 7 and NSX-T licenses. So how to give yourself a good challenge? Cloud Storage Interface setup. If the operation was successfully performed, you should see that the status changes in the NSX-T UI as it reconfigures the LB from Medium to Small. You can add a storage policy by going into vCenter menu -> Policies and profiles -> VM Storage Policies. This type of deployment is often inflexible, difficult to manage, and wastes resources because applications are limited to running on one system, regardless of the resources they actually utilize. An ad blocking extension or strict tracking protection is preventing this form from loading. I then verified everything was deployed properly by running the following commands. If you work in the IT industry, youve probably heard the term Kubernetes, which is typically used in association with containers technology. Container workloads are run on the Supervisor Cluster using vSphere Pods. This is for the older CPI versions. The YAML is the preferred way to go. # To address this issue, an exclude-nics filter for VMTools needs to be applied in order to prevent. While the Supervisor uses Kubernetes, it is not a Kubernetes cluster that is conformant. I dont have any in my case. Containers are gradually replacing virtual machines as the mechanism of choice for deploying dev/test environments and modern cloud-based applications. You can find the instructions below. Note: By default, it does not look like there is a check for a minimum of 3 ESXi hosts as you can see from the screenshot above, it is allowing me to proceed. For this example, I am just running the cURL command from within the VCSA. Copy the certificate key that gets outputted and use it with the Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more. -X GET 'https://pacific-nsx-2.cpbu.corp/policy/api/v1/infra/lb-services'. 
Your business already uses VMware extensively to run VMs, and your teams have deep expertise in working with VMware tooling. This helps for setting up Kubernetes with the vSphere CPI (Cloud Provider Interface) and CSI (Cloud Storage Interface) as they may have corrected certain problems along the way. To follow the exact steps above, the files can be found here. Kubernetes namespaces are set to revolutionize the way we manage applications in virtual infrastructure. The instructions below will show how you can re-size the LB that is provisioned by vSphere with Kubernetes. After you have deployed a vSphere K8s application, a Medium LB will be provisioned in NSX-T. You can see this by logging into NSX-T Manager and under Load Balancing->Load Balancers, you should see both a Distributed Load Balancer (DLB) used for Supervisor Cluster namespaces and regular LB. For the Cloud Storage Interface (CSI), I created a user (k8s-vcp) and roles and I assigned that user with the necessary roles to the resources. The edge cluster manages networking between your cluster and external resources. Well I told myself Id setup a 2 master nodes, 3 worker nodes Kubernetes cluster. curl -k -u 'admin:VMware1!VMware1!' They give developers autonomy and self-service within the businesss operational and security constraints. This makes it possible to host containers directly on the hypervisor without a separate instance of the Linux operating system. Can you confirm if its due to VC at 70 version instead of 701? I created the file cpi-global-secret.yaml and added the following content in it. Kubernetes can be deployed in a variety of methods. Probably the most notable advantage of VMware Kubernetes is that VMware is a platform that gives equal weight to both containers and traditional VMs. The declarative Kubernetes syntax can be used to define resources such as storage, network, scalability and availability. Re-upload the certificates. VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition is a dedicated Kubernetes-first infrastructure solution for multi-cloud organizations. Exploring the Cloud-init Datasource for VMware GuestInfo using vSphere, Quick Tip - ESXi 7.0 Update 3f now includes all Intel I219 devices from Community Networking Driver Fling, Heads Up - Potential missing vCenter Server Events due to sequence ID overflow, 1 x Nested ESXi VM with 4 vCPU and 36GB memory, 1 x NSX-T Unified Appliance with 4 vCPU and 12GB memory, 1 x NSX-T Edge with 8 vCPU and 12GB memory. "pacific-esxi-4" = "172.17.36.11" $env:var="value" in PowerShell): You can then list your resources as such: Run the following for all the nodes on the cluster, where vm-name is the name of the node vm. Size the domain according to the resource needs of your Kubernetes workload. I used the command line utility govc. Before diving in, let me give you the usual disclaimer . Now you may ask: Hey Dom, why didnt you use a managed k8s service such as AKS, EKS, GCP or even Digital Ocean flavor? (That said, you can still certainly use kubectl with your VMware clusters if you wish.). A workload domain is a software-defined set of compute, storage, and networking resources. I went ahead and installed VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7U3. I created a file nodesetup.sh and added the following into it. It intensified with the release of vSphere 7 in 2020, which comes with Kubernetes support deeply integrated into the VM platform. As I said, you can probably tune it down further if required. This method makes use of a highly optimized Linux kernel and a lightweight init process. vSphere with Kubernetes appears and behaves like a typical Kubernetes cluster to a developer. Sorry, I don't know when they'll have more details. This architecture enables orchestration and management or workloads in a consistent manner, regardless of their shape and formcontainer, virtual machine, or application. After having some container images waiting in a registry and awaiting to be used, I asked myself, how do I manage the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of these images when they will be spanned in containers? VMware makes significant contributions to the open-source Kubernetes software base and is active in Kubernetes communities and governance. So you need to disable swap. Once you have that identifier (e.g. In order to install all the nodes (masters and workers), VMWare recommends Ubuntu, so I picked the version 20.04 LTS. Once the setup has finished, I am presented with the commands to add other control planes as well as worker nodes. Over the past several years, VMware has invested substantially in tooling that makes it not just possible, but easy, to run Kubernetes clusters on top of VMware virtual machines. }. vSphere with Kubernetes provides users with traditional workloads, VMware Administrators may continue to use the vSphere environment theyve known for decades, while also delivering a world-class environment for containerized workloads in new applications. For VMware administrators, Kubernetes is a new way to deploy applications and manage their lifecycle, which is gradually replacing bare-metal virtualization.
So how would I do that? Another thing I noticed is that my "physical" ESXi host (part of a single host cluster) is tagged incompatible in the Enable Workload Management at first.
After creating my vSphere 7 with Kubernetes Automation Lab Deployment Script, I wanted to see what was the minimal footprint in terms of the physical resources but also the underlying components that would be required to allow me to still a fully functional vSphere with Kubernetes environment.
Edit 2022-01-17: (or know where to find 3.0 full version OVAs that can be eval'd. Protip: If you enable encryption, make sure you have the proper overall setup that comes with it, that is a Key Managed Service and all that. A Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster is guaranteed to function with all of your Kubernetes applications and tools because it is completely upstream-compliant Kubernetes. The Kubernetes deployment process is mostly automated. It is NOT recommended that you make NSX-T configuration changes behind vSphere with Kubernetes which is protected by default, but if you need to deploy a small setup or unable to provision VM with 8 vCPU (which I know several customers have mentioned), then this is a hack that could be considered. vSphere Administrators can create namespaces, which are Kubernetes terms for resource and policy management, and regulate the security, resource consumption, and networking capabilities available to developers. Once executed, all the pods in the kube-system namespace should be at the running state and all nodes should be untainted, All the nodes should also have ProviderIDs after the CPI is installed. for the possible values of the config file, refer to the guide. This is due because master has changed and I didnt pin a specific version. The topic of containers has been a hot topic for some time now. By default, three of these VMs are deployed as part of setting up the Supervisor Cluster, however I found a way to tell the Workload Control Plane (WCP) to only deploy two . All the machines in the cluster need to have the swapfile(s) off. Kubernetes was intended to address many of the issues that come with deploying applications, most notably by automating and orchestrating deployments and availability. govc relies on environment variables to connect to the vCenter. You can use any REST Client including Postman and/or PowerShell. Setup custom login banner when logging into a vSphere with Kubernetes Cluster, Workload Management PowerCLI Module for automating vSphere with Kubernetes, Guest Customization support for Instant Clone in vSphere 7, Troubleshooting tips for configuring vSphere with Kubernetes, https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/3.0/com.vmware.vcf.ovdeploy.doc_30/GUID-61453C12-3BB8-4C2A-A895-A1A805931BB2.html, First look at the new Supermicro E302-12D (Ice Lake D). This is accomplished by directly integrating the Spherelets worker agents into the ESXi hypervisor. For instance, in my CSI, I changed the user from Administrator to k8s-vcp. 
Well one of the main reason is that those do cost and can become costly. This can help you get started quickly. Everything needs to go through VMware vCenter which is the centralized management utility. Most of the issues I faced were around the EdgeVM and load balancer(s) not being deployed. If you prefer the command line, though, VMware has you covered, too. domain-c.) go ahead and perform the additional GET so we can retrieve its current configuration. Please temporarily disable ad blocking or whitelist this site, use less restrictive tracking protection, or enable JavaScript to load this form. 