How do I create a hybrid cluster?

A hybrid cluster combines bare metal and vSphere nodes. To create such a cluster, you will need an L2 network between all nodes of the cluster.

The Deckhouse Kubernetes Platform allows to set a prefix for the names of CloudEphemeral nodes added to a hybrid cluster with Static master nodes. To do this, use the instancePrefix parameter of the node-manager module. The prefix specified in the parameter will be added to the name of all CloudEphemeral nodes added to the cluster. It is not possible to set a prefix for a specific NodeGroup.

To create a hybrid cluster, you need to:

  1. Delete flannel from kube-system: kubectl -n kube-system delete ds flannel-ds.
  2. Enable the module and specify the necessary parameters.

Caution! Cloud-controller-manager synchronizes vSphere and Kubernetes states by deleting Kubernetes nodes that are not in vSphere. In a hybrid cluster, such behavior does not always make sense. That is why cloud-controller-manager automatically skips Kubernetes nodes that do not have the --cloud-provider=external parameter set (Deckhouse inserts static:// to nodes in .spec.providerID, and cloud-controller-manager ignores them).