Lab Guide - Kubernetes and Storage with the vSphere Cloud Provider - Step by Step

Written by Sam McGeown

Published on 19/6/2019 - Read in about 7 min (1480 words)

Published under VMware #vSAN #Cloud Native #vsphere #spbm #cnp #kubernetes #ubuntu #api

Following on from me recent post deploying Kubernetes with the NSX-T CNP, I wanted to extend my environment to make use of the vSphere Cloud Provider to enable Persistent Volumes backed by vSphere storage. This allows me to use Storage Policy to create Persistent Volumes based on policy. For example, I’m going to create two classes of storage, Fast and Slow - Fast will be vSAN based and Slow will be NFS based.

I highly recommend you review the previous post in order to familiarise yourself with the environment.

As always, I’m doing this in my lab as a learning exercise, and blogging it as a way of making sure I understand what I’m doing! I often stand on the shoulders of others, and in this case it is Myles Gray who deserves most of the credit. Again I am lucky to be able to poke Myles on our corporate slack, but you can also check out his Kubernetes on vSphere series which was immensely helpful.

VM Pre-requisites

All the Kubernetes Node VMs need to be placed in a VM folder that’s used to identify them. I’ve created folder /kubernetes/k8s-01 to reflect the name of the Kubernetes cluster

In addition, the Kubernetes Node VMs need to have an advanced setting configured disk.EnableUUID=1. You can configure this in the vSphere Web Client, or via PowerCLI/govc. The VMs need to be shut down for the change to take effect. The vSphere Cloud Provider docs say:

This step is necessary so that the VMDK always presents a consistent UUID to the VM, thus allowing the disk to be mounted properly.

Create Roles and Service Account

Create the required Roles

The roles and permissions required for dynamic provisioning can be found here.

• Navigate in the vSphere Client - Menu > Administration > Roles
• Add a new Role and select the permissions required. Repeat for each role.

Create a service account

Create a vsphere.local user, or add a domain user, to provide access and assign the new roles to.

• [email protected]
• VMware1!

Configure account roles and permissions

Assign the role vcp-manage-k8s-node-vms to the vcp-k8s-svc account on the Cluster and VM folder in which your Kubernetes nodes run, ensure the “Propagate to children” is ticked.

Since I’ll be using two different storage policies, I’ve added the vcp-manage-k8s-volumes to both the vSAN and NFS datastores.

Configure the vcp-view-k8s-spbm-profile role on the vCenter object

Finally, add the Read-only role to the Datacenter (and any Datastore Cluster or Datastore Folder, if you have them).

Create a Kubernetes Secret

To secure the vSphere credentials they can be stored as a Kubernetes Secret. First, covert the credentials to base64:

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echo -n '[email protected]' | base64
echo -n 'VMware1!' | base64

Create vcp-credentials.yaml with the base64 encoded credentials

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apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
 name: vcp-vcenter
type: Opaque
data:
   vcsa.definit.local.username: dmNwLWs4cy1zdmNAdnNwaGVyZS5sb2NhbA==
   vcsa.definit.local.password: Vk13YXJlMSE=

Create the secret using kubectl in the kube-system namespace:

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kubectl create -f vcp-credentials.yaml --namespace=kube-system

Validate the secret is visible, but not the passwords

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kubectl describe secret vcp-vcenter --namespace=kube-system

Name:         vcp-vcenter
Namespace:    kube-system
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>

Type:  Opaque

Data
====
vcsa.definit.local.password:  8 bytes
vcsa.definit.local.username:  25 bytes

#Configuring the Kubernetes vSphere Cloud Provider ##On the Kubernetes Master node

Create vsphere.conf

Create the vSphere configuration file in /etc/kubernetes/vcp/vsphere.conf - you’ll need to create the folder.

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[Global]
        # Global settings are defaults for all VirtualCenters defined below
        secret-name = "vcp-vcenter"
        secret-namespace = "kube-system"
        port = "443"
        insecure-flag = "1"

[VirtualCenter "vcsa.definit.local"]
        datacenters = "DefinIT"

[Workspace] # Defines 
        server = "vcsa.definit.local"
        datacenter = "DefinIT"
        default-datastore = "SYN-NFS-01"
        resourcepool-path = "Cluster02/Resources"
        folder = "kubernetes/k8s-01"

[Disk]  # Required...
        scsicontrollertype = pvscsi

Modify the kubelet service

The vSphere Storage for Kubernetes docs are a little out of date on this - you don’t modify the systemd unit file directly (which is likely to be overwritten in upgrades). Instead there’s an environment file referenced in the

Append the --cloud-provider and --cloud-config flags to /var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env

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KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS=--cgroup-driver=cgroupfs --network-plugin=cni --pod-infra-container-image=k8s.gcr.io/pause:3.1 --cloud-provider=vsphere --cloud-config=/etc/kubernetes/vcp/vsphere.conf

Modify container manifests

The container manifests for the Kubernetes API server and controller also need to be updated with the --cloud-provider and --cloud-config flags. These are located in the /etc/kubernetes/manifests folder.

Add the following to the spec:containers:command array, paying attention to whitespace (it is yaml, after all!)

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    - --cloud-provider=vsphere
    - --cloud-config=/etc/kubernetes/vcp/vsphere.conf

We also need add a mount for the vsphere.conf file location in spec:containers:volumeMounts

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    - mountPath: /etc/kubernetes/vcp
      name: vcp
      readOnly: true

And a volume in spec:volumes

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  - hostPath:
      path: /etc/kubernetes/vcp
      type: DirectoryOrCreate
    name: vcp

On the Kubernetes Worker nodes

Modify the kubelet service

Append the --cloud-provider flag to /var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env

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KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS=--cgroup-driver=cgroupfs --network-plugin=cni --pod-infra-container-image=k8s.gcr.io/pause:3.1 --cloud-provider=vsphere

Update the Node Provide IDs

Each Kubernetes node will need a *providerId *set so that the the created volumes are mounted to the correct node. The manual method for doing this is to look up the VM’s UUID in vSphere, then patch the node configuration with kubectl with the providerId spec. You can check if the providerId is set by running:

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kubectl get nodes -o json | jq '.items[]|[.metadata.name, .spec.providerID, .status.nodeInfo.systemUUID]'

If the output contains null for the providerId, then you need to set it:

Fortunately the documentation provides a hand script for doing so, it just needs govc, jq and kubectl configured on each machine. If you’re running on macOS like me, you can use homebrew to install what you need.

Consuming vSphere Storage

Create Storage Class

To consume the new storage provider, we need to create some storage classes. I’ve got two vSphere Storage Policies configured - one for vSAN “One-node vSAN Policy", and one for NFS “NFS-Storage". The vSAN policy is the default policy for my vSAN provider on the host the nodes run on, and the NFS policy is a tag-based policy that will allow placement on any datastore tagged with the “NFS” tag.

To use these policies I’m creating two storage classes - *fast *for vSAN:

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# sc-vsan-policy.yaml
kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
parameters:
    storagePolicyName: "One-node vSAN Policy"
    datastore: Cluster02-vSAN

And slow, for NFS:

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# sc-nfs-policy.yaml
kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: slow
provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
parameters:
    diskformat: thin
    storagePolicyName: "NFS-Storage"

The policies are imported using the kubectl apply -f sc-vsan-policy.yaml command, and we can check the policy is created by using the kubectl describe storageclaim fast command.

Create a Persistent Volume Claim

To be able to consume the Storage Class we need to create a persistent volume claim, or pvc, that uses the storage class:

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# pvc-vsan.yaml
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: pvc-vsan
  annotations:
    volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class: fast
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 2Gi

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# pvc-nfs.yaml
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: pvc-nfs
  annotations:
    volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class: slow
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 2Gi

Again, these can be imported using the kubectl apply command, and examined with the kubectl describe command

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kubectl create -f pvc-vsan.yaml
kubectl create -f pvc-nfs.yaml

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kubectl describe pvc
Name:          pvc-nfs
Namespace:     default
StorageClass:  slow
Status:        Bound
Volume:        pvc-3d6ac709-92af-11e9-ba0c-0050568aec2b
Labels:        <none>
Annotations:   pv.kubernetes.io/bind-completed: yes
               pv.kubernetes.io/bound-by-controller: yes
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class: slow
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
Finalizers:    [kubernetes.io/pvc-protection]
Capacity:      2Gi
Access Modes:  RWO
VolumeMode:    Filesystem
Events:
  Type       Reason                 Age                 From                         Message
  ----       ------                 ----                ----                         -------
  Normal     ProvisioningSucceeded  22s                 persistentvolume-controller  Successfully provisioned volume pvc-3d6ac709-92af-11e9-ba0c-0050568aec2b using kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
Mounted By:  <none>


Name:          pvc-vsan
Namespace:     default
StorageClass:  fast
Status:        Bound
Volume:        pvc-3f3363ee-92af-11e9-ba0c-0050568aec2b
Labels:        <none>
Annotations:   pv.kubernetes.io/bind-completed: yes
               pv.kubernetes.io/bound-by-controller: yes
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class: fast
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
Finalizers:    [kubernetes.io/pvc-protection]
Capacity:      2Gi
Access Modes:  RWO
VolumeMode:    Filesystem
Events:
  Type       Reason                 Age                 From                         Message
  ----       ------                 ----                ----                         -------
  Normal     ProvisioningSucceeded  19s                 persistentvolume-controller  Successfully provisioned volume pvc-3f3363ee-92af-11e9-ba0c-0050568aec2b using kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
Mounted By:  <none>

All being well, you should see some events initiated by the service account:

And if you check in the configured datastores, there should now be a kubevols folder and the disk provisioned by the pvc - vSAN:

And NFS

At this point, you can consume the persistent volumes as you do for any pod.

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