vsphere.md

vSphere

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

Out-of-tree vSphere cloud provider

Prerequisites

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

After this step you should have:

• vSphere upgraded to 6.7 U3 or later
• VM hardware upgraded to version 15 or higher
• UUID activated for each VM where Kubernetes will be deployed

Kubespray configuration

First in inventory/sample/group_vars/all/all.yml you must set the cloud provider to external and external_cloud_provider to external_cloud_provider.

cloud_provider:  "external"
external_cloud_provider: "vsphere"

Then, inventory/sample/group_vars/all/vsphere.yml, you need to declare your vCenter credentials and enable the vSphere CSI following the description below.

Variable	Required	Type	Choices	Default	Comment
external_vsphere_vcenter_ip	TRUE	string			IP/URL of the vCenter
external_vsphere_vcenter_port	TRUE	string		"443"	Port of the vCenter API
external_vsphere_insecure	TRUE	string	"true", "false"	"true"	set to "true" if the host above uses a self-signed cert
external_vsphere_user	TRUE	string			User name for vCenter with required privileges (Can also be specified with the VSPHERE_USER environment variable)
external_vsphere_password	TRUE	string			Password for vCenter (Can also be specified with the VSPHERE_PASSWORD environment variable)
external_vsphere_datacenter	TRUE	string			Datacenter name to use
external_vsphere_kubernetes_cluster_id	TRUE	string		"kubernetes-cluster-id"	Kubernetes cluster ID to use
vsphere_csi_enabled	TRUE	boolean		false	Enable vSphere CSI

Example configuration:

external_vsphere_vcenter_ip: "myvcenter.domain.com"
external_vsphere_vcenter_port: "443"
external_vsphere_insecure: "true"
external_vsphere_user: "administrator@vsphere.local"
external_vsphere_password: "K8s_admin"
external_vsphere_datacenter: "DATACENTER_name"
external_vsphere_kubernetes_cluster_id: "kubernetes-cluster-id"
vsphere_csi_enabled: true

For a more fine-grained CSI setup, refer to the vsphere-csi documentation.

Deployment

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

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

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