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.

In-tree vSphere cloud provider (deprecated)

Prerequisites (deprecated)

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 (deprecated)

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

cloud_provider: vsphere

Then, in the same file, you need to declare your vCenter credentials 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)