Deckhouse Kubernetes Platform on VMware vSphere

List of required vSphere resources

• User with required set of permissions.
• Network with DHCP server and access to the Internet
• Datacenter with a tag in k8s-region category.
• Cluster with a tag in k8s-zone category.
• Datastore with required tags.
• Template — the prepared VM image.

vSphere configuration

Installing govc

You’ll need the vSphere CLI — govc — to proceed with the rest of the guide.

After the installation is complete, set the environment variables required to work with vCenter:

export GOVC_URL=example.com
export GOVC_USERNAME=<username>@vsphere.local
export GOVC_PASSWORD=<password>
export GOVC_INSECURE=1

Creating tags and tag categories

Instead of “regions” and “zones”, VMware vSphere provides Datacenter and Cluster objects. We will use tags to match them with “regions”/”zones”. These tags fall into two categories: one for “regions” tags and the other for “zones” tags.

Create a tag category using the following commands:

govc tags.category.create -d "Kubernetes Region" k8s-region
govc tags.category.create -d "Kubernetes Zone" k8s-zone

Create tags in each category. If you intend to use multiple “zones” (Cluster), create a tag for each one of them:

govc tags.create -d "Kubernetes Region" -c k8s-region test-region
govc tags.create -d "Kubernetes Zone Test 1" -c k8s-zone test-zone-1
govc tags.create -d "Kubernetes Zone Test 2" -c k8s-zone test-zone-2

Attach the “region” tag to Datacenter:

govc tags.attach -c k8s-region test-region /<DatacenterName>

Attach “zone” tags to Cluster objects:

govc tags.attach -c k8s-zone test-zone-1 /<DatacenterName>/host/<ClusterName1>
govc tags.attach -c k8s-zone test-zone-2 /<DatacenterName>/host/<ClusterName2>

Datastore configuration

Assign the “region” and “zone” tags to the Datastore objects to automatically create a StorageClass in the Kubernetes cluster:

govc tags.attach -c k8s-region test-region /<DatacenterName>/datastore/<DatastoreName1>
govc tags.attach -c k8s-zone test-zone-1 /<DatacenterName>/datastore/<DatastoreName1>

govc tags.attach -c k8s-region test-region /<DatacenterName>/datastore/<DatastoreName1>
govc tags.attach -c k8s-zone test-zone-2 /<DatacenterName>/datastore/<DatastoreName2>

Creating and assigning a role

Create a role with the corresponding permissions:

govc role.create deckhouse \
   Cns.Searchable Datastore.AllocateSpace Datastore.Browse Datastore.FileManagement \
   Global.GlobalTag Global.SystemTag Network.Assign StorageProfile.View \
   $(govc role.ls Admin | grep -F -e 'Folder.' -e 'InventoryService.' -e 'Resource.' -e 'VirtualMachine.')

Assign the role to a user on the vCenter object:

govc permissions.set -principal <username>@vsphere.local -role deckhouse /

Preparing a virtual machine image

It is recommended to use a pre-built cloud image/OVA file provided by the OS vendor to create a Template:

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• CentOS
• Rocky Linux (Generic Cloud / OpenStack section)

If you need to use your own image, please refer to the documentation.