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

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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:

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

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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:

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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 1: Overview

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This past week and half, I have been spending quite a bit of time familiarizing myself with the recently released VMware Pivotal Container Service solution, also referred to as VMware PKS for short (yes, that is a K not a C which is a nod to Google's container scheduler Kubernetes). VMware PKS is part of a project that I am currently working on and I figure I would share the process and steps I took to deploy VMware PKS in my own personal lab, in case other folks are interested in trying out this neat and powerful solution for deploying Cloud Native Apps using Kubernetes which was co-developed between VMware, Pivotal and Google.

If you would like to learn more about this first release of VMware PKS and the benefits it provides to both developers (consumers) and operators (admins/SRE) for Kubernetes infrastructure, check out this blog post here. Merlin Glynn, one of the Product Managers for PKS also did an awesome light board video overview of VMware PKS if you want the sparks notes version. If you simply want to give PKS a try without deploying anything, the CNA folks have also published a PKS HOL which can you find here. Another useful resource is the Getting Started with Kubernetes-as-a-Service post from Michael West who works in CNA team and built the PKS HOL.


This will be the first, in a series of articles outlining my VMware PKS deployment and configuration which hopefully can help benefit others as it took me several attempts while learning about the solution. Although the first few articles will include manual guidance, rest assure, there will be some cool automation towards the end but I figure that folks may want to go through this once by hand to get a good understanding on all the different components and how they interact with each other. Plus, some of the PKS-specific automation is still being worked on by the product team and hopefully I will be able to share some of that real soon.

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

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