WilliamLam.com

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH

by // 1 Comment

In this article, we will begin our PKS installation by deploying Pivotal Ops Manager which provides a management interface (UI/API) for Cloud/Platform Operators to manage the complete lifecycle of both BOSH and PKS from install, patch and upgrade. In addition, you can also deploy new application services using Ops Manager Tiles like adding an Enterprise-class Container Registry like VMware Harbor which can then be configured to work with PKS or any other solution that you may have deployed using Ops Manager.

As part of the the Ops Manager deployment, we will also install the BOSH Tile which is responsible for managing, provisioning, monitoring and self-healing of the VMs that make up a Kubernetes (K8S) Cluster deployment within PKS. BOSH supports a number of IaaS platforms which includes vSphere and through their Cloud Provider Interface (CPI), it will ensure the VMs are always up and in some cases, it may even delete and simply re-deploy VMs if they become unresponsive. This is all done completely automated without any interaction from the Cloud/Platform Operator which means for Developers, they can rest assure whatever SLA or High Availability options that have been defined as part of their application deployment, the underlying platform will ensure those requirements will always be met.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

[Read more...]

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 3: NSX-T

by // 6 Comments

In this article, we are now going to start configuring NSX-T so that it will be ready for us to install PKS and consume the networking and security services provided by NSX-T. The result is that PKS can deliver on demand provisioning of all NSX-T components: Container Network Interface (CNI), NSX-T Container Plugin (NCP) POD, NSX Node Agent POD, etc) automatically when a new Kubernetes (K8S) Cluster is requested, all done with a single CLI or API call. In addition, PKS also provides a unique capability through its integration with NSX-T to enable network micro-segmentation at the K8S namespace level which allows Cloud/Platform Operators to manage access between application and/or tenant users at at a much finer grain level than was possible before which is really powerful!

As mentioned in the previous blog post, I will not be walking through a step-by-step NSX-T installation and I will assume that you already have a basic NSX-T environment deployed which includes a few ESXi host prepped as Transport Nodes and at least 1 NSX-T Controller and 1 NSX-T Edge. If you would like a detailed step by step walk through, you can refer to the NSX-T documentation here or you can even leverage my Automated NSX-T Lab Deployment script to setup the base environment and modify based on the steps in this article. In fact, this is the same script I have used to deploy my own NSX-T environment for PKS with some minor modification which I will be sharing at a later date.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

[Read more...]

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 2: PKS Client

by // 6 Comments

In this article, we will configure the various command-line tools that will be used to interact with the PKS Platform which will then be consumed by either the Operators (managing the PKS infrastructure) and/or the the Developers (consumers of the Kubernetes Clusters).

Below is a quick summary, description and the consumers of the CLIs that we will be installing:

CLI Description Consumer
pks Used to create/delete and manage K8S Clusters Operator
kubectl Used to interact with K8S Cluster and deploy applications including scaling up/down Developer
uaac Used to manage user accounts and authorization for the PKS platform Operator
bosh Used to manage PKS deployments and provides information about the VMs using its Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) which is vSphere in this case Operator
om Used to Used to manager and interact with Ops Manager Operator
nsx-cli.sh Used to clean NSX-T objects after a K8S have been deleted (will be Automated by PKS in future release) Operator

Both PKS and Kubectl CLIs are supported on either Windows, MacOS and Linux, you can refer to Part 1 for a link to the binary downloads. The remainder of the tools are primarily used by Operators and to make them accessible for multiple users, you can deploy a centralized management VM. In my lab, I am referring to this VM as the "PKS Client" which is where we will be installing all the CLIs. You can use a variety of supported Operating Systems, but I found Ubuntu to work the best, especially for some of the package dependencies. I did try to use our own PhotonOS, but I was having some trouble figuring out the required packages. If I figure it out, then I will update the article as that may be preferred over Ubuntu if you have never worked with it before.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

[Read more...]