During TKG cluster creation you might see the following errors.
Error: failed to get
provider components for the "cluster-api:v1.1.3" provider: failed to get
repository client for the CoreProvider with name cluster-api: error creating
the GitHub repository client: failed to get GitHub latest version: failed to
get repository versions: failed to get repository versions: rate limit for
github api has been reached. Please wait one hour or get a personal API
token and assign it to the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable
This is due to GitHub rate limiting for anonymous access to GitHub. CSE TKG clusters pull images from GitHub, and if you are pulling too many within a short period of time, you will eventually hit the rate limits.
Container Service Extension 4 was released recently. This post aims to help ease the setup of CSE 4.0 as it has a different deployment model using the Solutions framework instead of deploying the CSE appliance into the traditional Management cluster concept used by service providers to run VMware management components such as vCenter, NSX-T Managers, Avi Controllers and other management systems.
Step 1 – Create a CSE Service Account
Perform these steps using the administrator@system account or an equivalent system administrator role.
Setup a Service Account in the Provider (system) organization with the role CSE Admin Role.
In my environment I created a user to use as a service account named svc-cse. You’ll notice that this user has been assigned the CSE Admin Role.
The CSE Admin Role is created automatically by CSE when you use the CSE Management UI as a Provider administrator, just do these steps using the administrator@system account.
Step 2 – Create a token for the Service Account
Log out of VCD and log back into the Provider organization as the service account you created in Step 1 above. Once logged in, it should look like the following screenshot, notice that the svc-cse user is logged into the Provider organization.
Click on the downward arrow at the top right of the screen, next to the user svc-cse and select User Preferences.
Under Access Tokens, create a new token and copy the token to a safe place. This is what you use to deploy the CSE appliance later.
Log out of VCD and log back in as adminstrator@system to the Provider organization.
Step 3 – Deploy CSE appliance
Create a new tenant Organization where you will run CSE. This new organization is dedicated to VCD extensions such as CSE and is managed by the service provider.
For example you can name this new organization something like “solutions-org“. Create an Org VDC within this organization and also the necessary network infrastructure such as a T1 router and an organization network with internet access.
Still logged into the Provider organization, open another tab by clicking on the Open in Tenant Portal link to your “solutions-org” organization. You must deploy the CSE vApp as a Provider.
Now you can deploy the CSE vApp.
Use the Add vApp From Catalog workflow.
Accept the EULA and continue with the workflow.
When you get the Step 8 of the Create vApp from Template, ensure that you setup the OVF properties like my screenshot below:
The important thing to note is to ensure that you are using the correct service account username and use the token from Step 2 above.
Also since you must have the service account in the Provider organization, leave the default system organization for CSE service account’s org.
The last value is very important, it must by set to the tenant organization that will run the CSE appliance, in our case it is the “solutions-org” org.
Once the OVA is deployed you can boot it up or if you want to customize the root password then do so before you start the vApp. If not, the default credentials are root and vmware.
Rights required for deploying TKG clusters
Ensure that the user that is logged into a tenant organization has the correct rights to deploy a TKG cluster. This user must have at a minimum the rights in the Kubernetes Cluster Author Global Role.
App LaunchPad
You’ll also need to upgrade App Launchpad to the latest version alp-2.1.2-20764259 to support CSE 4.0 deployed clusters.
Also ensure that the App-Launchpad-Service role has the rights to manage CAPVCD clusters.
Otherwise you may encounter the following issue:
VCD API Protected by Web Application Firewalls
If you are using a web application firewall (WAF) in front of your VCD cells and you are blocking access to the provider side APIs. You will need to add the SNAT IP address of the T1 from the solutions-org into the WAF whitelist.
The CSE appliance will need access to the VCD provider side APIs.
I wrote about using a WAF in front of VCD in the past to protect provider side APIs. You can read those posts here and here.
For those partners that have been testing the beta, you’ll need to remove all traces of it before you can install the GA version. VMware does not support upgrading or migrating from beta builds to GA builds.
This is a post to help you clean up your VMware Cloud Director environment in preparation for the GA build of CSE 4.0.
For those partners that have been testing the beta, you’ll need to remove all traces of it before you can install the GA version. VMware does not support upgrading or migrating from beta builds to GA builds.
If you don’t clean up, when you try to configure CSE again with the CSE Management wizard, you’ll see the message below:
“Server configuration entity already exists.”
Delete CSE Roles
First delete all the CSE Roles that the beta has setup, the GA version of CSE will recreate these for you when you use the CSE management wizard. Don’t forget to assign the new role to your CSE service account when you deploy the CSE GA OVA.
Use the Postman Collection to clean up
I’ve included a Postman collection on my Github account, available here.
Hopefully, it is self-explanatory. Authenticate against the VCD API, then run each API request in order, make sure you obtain the entity and entityType IDs before you delete.
If you’re unable to delete the entity or entityTypes, you may need to delete all of the CSE clusters before, that means cleaning up all PVCs, PVs, deployments and then the clusters themselves.
Deploy CSE GA Normally
You’ll now be able to use the Configure Management wizard and deploy CSE 4.0 GA as normal.
Known Issues
If you’re unable to delete any of these entities then run a POST using /resolve.
For example, https://vcd.vmwire.com/api-explorer/provider#/definedEntity/resolveDefinedEntity
Once, it is resolved, you can go ahead and delete the entity.
I’ve been experimenting with the VMware Cloud Director, Container Service Extension and App Launchpad applications and wanted to test if these applications would run in Kubernetes.
The short answer is yes!
I’ve been experimenting with the VMware Cloud Director, Container Service Extension and App Launchpad applications and wanted to test if these applications would run in Kubernetes.
The short answer is yes!
I initially deployed these apps as a standalone Docker container to see if they would run as a container. I wanted to eventually get them to run in a Kubernetes cluster to benefit from all the goodies that Kubernetes provides.
Packaging the apps wasn’t too difficult, just needed patience and a lot of Googling. The process was as follows:
run a Docker image of a Linux image, CentOS for VCD and Photon for ALP and CSE.
prepare all the pre-requisites, such as yum update and tdnf update.
commit the image to a Harbor registry
build a Helm chart to deploy the applications using the images and then create a shell script that is run when the image starts to install and run the applications.
Well, its not that simple but you can take a look at the code for all three Helm Charts on my Github or pull them from my public Harbor repository.
The values.yaml file is the only file you’ll need to edit, just update to suit your environment.
# Default values for vmware-cloud-director.
# This is a YAML-formatted file.
# Declare variables to be passed into your templates.
replicaCount: 1
installFirstCell:
enabled: true
installAdditionalCell:
enabled: false
storageClass: iscsi
pvcCapacity: 2Gi
vcdNfs:
server: 10.92.124.20
mountPath: /mnt/nvme/vcd-k8s
vcdSystem:
user: administrator
password: Vmware1!
email: admin@domain.local
systemName: VCD
installationId: 1
postgresql:
dbHost: postgresql.vmware-cloud-director.svc.cluster.local
dbName: vcloud
dbUser: vcloud
dbPassword: Vmware1!
# Availability zones in deployment.yaml are setup for TKG and must match VsphereFailureDomain and VsphereDeploymentZones
availabilityZones:
enabled: false
httpsService:
type: LoadBalancer
port: 443
consoleProxyService:
port: 8443
publicAddress:
uiBaseUri: https://vcd-k8s.vmwire.com
uiBaseHttpUri: http://vcd-k8s.vmwire.com
restapiBaseUri: https://vcd-k8s.vmwire.com
restapiBaseHttpUri: http://vcd-k8s.vmwire.com
consoleProxy: vcd-vmrc.vmwire.com
tls:
certFullChain: |-
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
wildcard certificate
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
intermediate certificate
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
root certificate
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
certKey: |-
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
wildcard certificate private key
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
The installation process is quite fast, less than three minutes to get the first pod up and running and two minutes for each subsequent pod. That means a VCD multi-cell system up and running in less than ten minutes.
I’ve deployed VCD as a StatefulSet, and have three replicas. Since the replica is set to three, three VCD “Pods” are deployed, in the old world these would be the cells. Here you can see three pods running which would provide both load balancing and high-availability. The other pod is the PostgreSQL database that these cells use. You should also be able to see that Kubernetes has scheduled each pod on a different worker node. I have three worker nodes in this Kubernetes cluster.
Below is the view in VCD of the three cells.
The StatefulSet also has a LoadBalancer service configured for performing the load balancing of the HTTP and Console Proxy traffic on TCP 443 and TCP 8443 respectively.
You can see the LoadBalancer service has configured the services for HTTP and Console Proxy. Note, that this is done automatically by Kubernetes using a manifest in the Helm Chart.
Migrating an existing VCD instance to Kubernetes
If you want to migrate an existing instance to Kubernetes, then use this post here.
How to install: Update values.yaml and then run helm install container-service-extension oci://harbor.vmwire.com/library/container-service-extension --version 0.2.0 -n container-service-extension
Here’s CSE running as a pod in Kubernetes. Since CSE is a stateless application, I’ve configured it to run as a Deployment.
CSE also does not need a database as it purely communicates with VCD through a message bus such as MQTT or RabbitMQ. Additionally no external access to CSE is required as this is done via VCD, so no load balancer is needed either.
You can see that when CSE is idle it only needs 1 milicore of CPU and 102Mib of RAM. This is so much better in terms of resource requirements than running CSE in a VM. This is one of the advantages of running pods vs VMs. Pods will use considerably fewer resources than VMs.
How to install: Update values.yaml and then run helm install app-launchpad oci://harbor.vmwire.com/library/app-launchpad --version 0.4.0 -n app-launchpad
The values.yaml file is the only file you’ll need to edit, just update to suit your environment.
# Default values for app-launchpad.
# This is a YAML-formatted file.
# Declare variables to be passed into your templates.
alpConnect:
saUser: "svc-alp"
saPass: Vmware1!
url: https://vcd-k8s.vmwire.com
adminUser: administrator@system
adminPass: Vmware1!
mqtt: true
eula: accept
# If you accept the EULA then type "accept" in the EULA key value to install ALP. You can fine the EULA in the README.md file.
I’ve already written an article about ALP here. That article contains a lot more details so I’ll share a few screenshots below for ALP.
Just like CSE, ALP is a stateless application and is deployed as a Deployment. ALP also does not require external access through a load balancer as it too communicates with VCD using the MQTT or RabbitMQ message bus.
You can see that ALP when idle requires just 3 milicores of CPU and 400 Mib of RAM.
ALP can be deployed with multiple instances to provide load balancer and high availability. This is done by deploying RabbitMQ and connecting ALP and VCD to the same exchange. VCD does not support multiple instances of ALP if MQTT is used.
When RabbitMQ is configured, then ALP can be scaled by changing the Deployment number of replicas to two or more. Kubernetes would then deploy additional pods with ALP.
This post summarizes how you can migrate the VMware Cloud Director database from PostgreSQL running in the VCD appliance into a PostgreSQL pod running in Kuberenetes and then creating new VCD cells running as pods in Kubernetes to run VCD services. In summary, modernizing VCD as a modern application.
This post summarizes how you can migrate the VMware Cloud Director database from PostgreSQL running in the VCD appliance into a PostgreSQL pod running in Kuberenetes and then creating new VCD cells running as pods in Kubernetes to run VCD services. In summary, modernizing VCD into a modern application.
I wanted to experiment with VMware Cloud Director to see if it would run in Kubernetes. One of the reasons for this is to reduce resource consumption in my home lab. The VCD appliance can be quite a high resource consuming VM needing a minimum of 2 vCPUs and 6GB of RAM. Running VCD in Kubernetes would definitely reduce this down and free up much needed RAM for other applications. Other benefits by running this workload in Kubernetes would benefit from faster deployment, higher availability, easier lifecycle management and operations and additional benefits from the ecosystem such as observability tools.
Here’s a view of the current VCD appliance in the portal. 172.16.1.34 is the IP of the appliance, 172.16.1.0/27 is the network for the NSX-T segment that I’ve created for the VCD DMZ network. At the end of this post, you’ll see VCD running in Kubernetes pods with IP addresses assigned by the CNI instead.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Shared Services Cluster
I am using a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster set up for shared services. Its the ideal place to run applications that in the virtual machine world would have been running in a traditional vSphere Management Cluster. I also run Container Service Extension and App Launchpad Kubernetes pods in this cluster too.
Step 1. Deploy PostgreSQL with Kubeapps into a Kubernetes cluster
If you have Kubeapps, this is the easiest way to deploy PostgreSQL.
Copy my settings below to create a PostgreSQL database server and the vcloud user and database that are required for the database restore.
Step 1. Alternatively, use Helm directly.
# Create database server using KubeApps or Helm, vcloud user with password
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
# Pull the chart, unzip then edit values.yaml
helm pull bitnami/postgresql
tar zxvf postgresql-11.1.11.tgz
helm install postgresql bitnami/postgresql -f /home/postgresql/values.yaml -n vmware-cloud-director
# Expose postgres service using load balancer
k expose pod -n vmware-cloud-director postgresql-primary-0 --type=LoadBalancer --name postgresql-public
# Get the IP address of the load balancer service
k get svc -n vmware-cloud-director postgresql-public
# Connect to database as postgres user from VCD appliance to test connection
psql --host 172.16.4.70 -U postgres -p 5432
# Type password you used when you deployed postgresql
# Quit
\q
Step 2. Backup database from VCD appliance and restore to PostgreSQL Kubernetes pod
Log into the VCD appliance using SSH.
# Stop vcd services on all VCD appliances
service vmware-vcd stop
# Backup database and important files on VCD appliance
./opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create_backup.sh
# Unzip the zip file into /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/backups
# Restore database using pg_dump backup file. Do this from the VCD appliance as it already has the postgres tools installed.
pg_restore --host 172.16.4.70 -U postgres -p 5432 -C -d postgres /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/backups/vcloud-database.sql
# Edit responses.properties and change IP address of database server from load balancer IP to the assigned FQDN for the postgresql pod, e.g. postgresql-primary.vmware-cloud-director.svc.cluster.local
# Shutdown the VCD appliance, its no longer needed
Step 3. Deploy Helm Chart for VCD
# Pull the Helm Chart
helm pull oci://harbor.vmwire.com/library/vmware-cloud-director
# Uncompress the Helm Chart
tar zxvf vmware-cloud-director-0.5.0.tgz
# Edit the values.yaml to suit your needs
# Deploy the Helm Chart
helm install vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director --version 0.5.0 -n vmware-cloud-director -f /home/vmware-cloud-director/values.yaml
# Wait for about five minutes for the installation to complete
# Monitor logs
k logs -f -n vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director-0
Known Issues
If you see an error such as:
Error starting application: Unable to create marker file in the transfer spooling area: VfsFile[fileObject=file:///opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/cells/4c959d7c-2e3a-4674-b02b-c9bbc33c5828]
This is due to the transfer share being created by a different vcloud user on the original VCD appliance. This user has a different Linux user ID, normally 1000 or 1001, we need to change this to work with the new vcloud user.
Run the following commands to resolve this issue:
# Launch a bash session into the VCD pod
k exec -it -n vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director-0 -- /bin/bash
# change ownership to the /transfer share to the vcloud user
chmod -R vcloud:vcloud /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer
# type exit to quit
exit
Once that’s done, the cell can start and you’ll see the following:
Successfully verified transfer spooling area: VfsFile[fileObject=file:///opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer]
Cell startup completed in 2m 26s
Accessing VCD
The VCD pod is exposed using a load balancer in Kubernetes. Ports 443 and 8443 are exposed on a single IP, just like how it is configured on the VCD appliance.
Run the following to obtain the new load balancer IP address of VCD.
k get svc -n vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director
Redirect your DNS server record to point to this new IP address for both the HTTP and VMRC services, e.g., 172.16.4.71.
If everything ran successfully, you should now be able to log into VCD. Here’s my VCD instance that I use for my lab environment which was previously running in a VCD appliance, now migrated over to Kubernetes.
Notice, the old cell is now inactive because it is powered-off. It can now be removed from VCD and deleted from vCenter.
The pod vmware-cloud-director-0 is now running the VCD application. Notice its assigned IP address of 100.107.74.159. This is the pod’s IP address.
Everything else will work as normal, any UI customizations, TLS certificates are kept just as before the migration, this is because we restored the database and used the responses.properties to add new cells.
Even opening a remote console to a VM will continue to work.
Load Balancer is NSX Advanced LB (Avi)
Avi provides the load balancing services automatically through the Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO).
AKO automatically configures the services in Avi for you when services are exposed.
Deploy another VCD cell, I mean pod
It is very easy now to scale the VCD by deploying additional replicas.
Edit the values.yaml file and change the replicas number from 1 to 2.
# Upgrade the Helm Chart
helm upgrade vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director --version 0.4.0 -n vmware-cloud-director -f /home/vmware-cloud-director/values.yaml
# Wait for about five minutes for the installation to complete
# Monitor logs
k logs -f -n vmware-cloud-director vmware-cloud-director-1
When the VCD services start up successfully, you’ll notice that the cell will appear in the VCD UI and Avi is also updated automatically with another pool.
We can also see that Avi is load balancing traffic across the two pods.
Deploy as many replicas as you like.
Resource usage
Here’s a very brief overview of what we have deployed so far.
Notice that the two PostgreSQL pods together are only using 700 Mb of RAM. The VCD pods are consuming much more. But a vast improvement over the 6GB that one appliance needed previously.
High Availability
You can ensure that the VCD pods are scheduled on different Kubernetes worker nodes by using multi availability zone topology. To do this just change the values.yaml.
# Availability zones in deployment.yaml are setup for TKG and must match VsphereFailureDomain and VsphereDeploymentZones
availabilityZones:
enabled: true
This makes sure that if you scale up the vmware-cloud-director statefulset, Kubernetes will ensure that each of the pods will not be placed on the same worker node.
As you can see from the Kubernetes Dashboard output under Resource usage above, vmware-cloud-director-0 and vmware-cloud-director-1 pods are scheduled on different worker nodes.
More importantly, you can see that I have also used the same for the postgresql-primary-0 and postgresql-read-0 pods. These are really important to keep separate in case of failure of a worker node or of an ESX server that the worker node runs on.
Finally
Here are a few screenshots of VCD, CSE and ALP all running in my Shared Services Kubernetes cluster.
Backing up the PostgreSQL database
For Day 2 operations, such as backing up the PostgreSQL database you can use Velero or just take a backup of the database using the pg_dump tool.
Backing up the database with pg_dump using a Docker container
Its super easy to take a database backup using a Docker container, just make sure you have Docker running on your workstation and that it can reach the load balancer IP address for the PostgreSQL service.
This post is an update to enable the automated installation of Container Service Extension to version 3.1.2, the script is also updated for better efficiency.
This post is an update to enable the automated installation of Container Service Extension to version 3.1.2, the script is also updated for better efficiency.
You can find the details on my github account under the repository named cse-automated.
Ensure you review the README.MD and read the comments in the script too.
Pre-Requisites
Deploy Photon OVA into vSphere, 2 VCPUs, 4GB RAM is more than enough
Assign VM a hostname and static IP
Ensure it can reach the Internet
Ensure it can also reach VCD on TCP 443 and vCenter servers registered in VCD on TCP 443.
SSH into the Photon VM
Note that my environment has CA signed SSL certs and the script has been tested against this environment. I have not tested the script in environments with self-signed certificates.
Download cse-install.sh script to Photon VM
# Download the script to the Photon VM
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hugopow/cse-automated/main/cse-install.sh --output cse-install.sh
# Make script executable
chmod +x cse-install.sh
Change the cse-install.sh script
Make sure you change passwords, CA SSL certificates and environment variables to suit your environment.
Launch the script, sit back and relax
# Run as root
sh cse-install.sh
Demo Video
Old video of CSE 3.0.4 automated install, but still the same process.
When trying to resize a TKGm cluster with CSE, you might encounter this error below:
Cluster resize request failed. Please contact your provider if this problem persists. (Error: Unknown error)
This post shows how you can use the vcd cse cli to workaround this problem.
When trying to resize a TKGm cluster with CSE in the VCD UI, you might encounter this error below:
Cluster resize request failed. Please contact your provider if this problem persists. (Error: Unknown error)
Checking the logs in ~/.cse-logs there are no logs that show what the error is. It appears to be an issue with the Container UI Plugin for CSE 3.1.0.
If you review the console messages in Chrome’s developer tools you might see something like the following:
TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'length')
at getFullSpec (https://vcd.vmwire.com/tenant/tenant1/uiPlugins/80134fc9-86e1-41db-9d02-b02d5e9e1e3c/ca5642fa-7186-4da2-b273-2dbd3451fd50/bundle.js:1:170675)
at resizeCseCluster
This post shows how you can use the vcd cse cli to workaround this problem.
Using the vcd cse cli to resize a TKGm cluster
First log into the CSE appliance or somewhere with vcd cse cli installed
Then log into the VCD Org that has the cluster that you want to resize with a user with the role with the cse:nativecluster rights bundle.
Change the workers: count to your new desired number of workers.
Save this file as update_my_cluster.yaml
Update the cluster with this command
vcd cse cluster apply update_my_cluster.yaml
You’ll notice that CSE will deploy another worker node into the same vApp and after a few minutes your TKGm cluster will have another node added to it.
root@photon-manager [ ~/.kube ]# kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
mstr-zcn7 Ready control-plane,master 14m v1.20.5+vmware.2
node-7swy Ready <none> 10m v1.20.5+vmware.2
node-90sb Ready <none> 12m v1.20.5+vmware.2
root@photon-manager [ ~/.kube ]# kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
mstr-zcn7 Ready control-plane,master 22m v1.20.5+vmware.2
node-7swy Ready <none> 17m v1.20.5+vmware.2
node-90sb Ready <none> 19m v1.20.5+vmware.2
node-rbmz Ready <none> 43s v1.20.5+vmware.2
Viewing client logs
The vcd cse cli commands are client side, to enable logging for this do the following
Run this command in the CSE appliance or on your workstation that has the vcd cse cli installed.
CSE_CLIENT_WIRE_LOGGING=True
View the logs by using this command
tail -f cse-client-debug.log
A couple of notes
The vcd cse cluster resize command is not enabled if your CSE server is using legacy_mode: false. You can read up on this in this link.
Therefore, the only way to resize a cluster is to update it using the vcd cse cluster apply command. The apply command supports the following:
apply a configuration to a cluster resource by filename. The resource will be created if it does not exist. (The command can be used to create the cluster, scale-up/down worker count, scale-up NFS nodes, upgrade the cluster to a new K8s version.
CSE 3.1.1 can only scale-up a TKGm cluster, it does not support scale-down yet.
Photon OS 3 does not support Linux guest customization unfortunately, so we will use the links below to manually setup the OS with a hostname and static IP address.
Boot the VM, the default credentials are root with password changeme. Change the default password.
Photon 3 has the older repositories, so we will need to update to newer repositories as detailed in this KB article. I’ve included this in the instructions below.
Copypasta or use create a bash script.
# Update Photon repositories
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/dl.bintray.com\/vmware/packages.vmware.com\/photon\/$releasever/g' photon.repo photon-updates.repo photon-extras.repo photon-debuginfo.repo
# If you get errors with the above command, then copy the command from the KB article.
# Update Photon
tdnf --assumeyes update
# Install dependencies
tdnf --assumeyes install build-essential python3-devel python3-pip git
# Update python3, cse supports python3 version 3.7.3 or greater, it does not support python 3.8 or above.
tdnf --assumeyes update python3
# Prepare cse user and application directories
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse
chmod 775 -R /opt
chmod 777 /
groupadd cse
useradd cse -g cse -m -p Vmware1! -d /opt/vmware/cse
chown cse:cse -R /opt
# Run as cse user, add your public ssh key to CSE server
su - cse
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys << EOF
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAhcw67bz3xRjyhPLysMhUHJPhmatJkmPUdMUEZre+MeiDhC602jkRUNVu43Nk8iD/I07kLxdAdVPZNoZuWE7WBjmn13xf0Ki2hSH/47z3ObXrd8Vleq0CXa+qRnCeYM3FiKb4D5IfL4XkHW83qwp8PuX8FHJrXY8RacVaOWXrESCnl3cSC0tA3eVxWoJ1kwHxhSTfJ9xBtKyCqkoulqyqFYU2A1oMazaK9TYWKmtcYRn27CC1Jrwawt2zfbNsQbHx1jlDoIO6FLz8Dfkm0DToanw0GoHs2Q+uXJ8ve/oBs0VJZFYPquBmcyfny4WIh4L0lwzsiAVWJ6PvzF5HMuNcwQ== rsa-key-20210508
EOF
cat >> ~/.bash_profile << EOF
# For Container Service Extension
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
EOF
# Install CSE in virtual environment
python3 -m venv /opt/vmware/cse/python
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
pip3 install container-service-extension==3.1.1
cse version
source ~/.bash_profile
# Prepare vcd-cli
mkdir -p ~/.vcd-cli
cat > ~/.vcd-cli/profiles.yaml << EOF
extensions:
- container_service_extension.client.cse
EOF
vcd cse version
# Add my Let's Encrypt intermediate and root certs. Use your certificates issued by your CA to enable verify=true with CSE.
cat >> /opt/vmware/cse/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages/certifi/cacert.pem << EOF
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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=
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
EOF
# Create service account
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator -p Vmware1!
cse create-service-role vcd.vmwire.com
# Enter system administrator username and password
# Create VCD service account for CSE
vcd user create --enabled svc-cse Vmware1! "CSE Service Role"
# Create config file
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse/config
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf << EOF
mqtt:
verify_ssl: false
vcd:
host: vcd.vmwire.com
log: true
password: Vmware1!
port: 443
username: administrator
verify: true
vcs:
- name: vcenter.vmwire.com
password: Vmware1!
username: administrator@vsphere.local
verify: true
service:
enforce_authorization: false
legacy_mode: false
log_wire: false
no_vc_communication_mode: false
processors: 15
telemetry:
enable: true
broker:
catalog: cse-catalog
ip_allocation_mode: pool
network: default-organization-network
org: cse
remote_template_cookbook_url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/container-service-extension-templates/master/template_v2.yaml
storage_profile: 'iscsi'
vdc: cse-vdc
EOF
cse encrypt /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf --output /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
chmod 600 /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse check /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse template list
# Import TKGm ova with this command
# Copy the ova to /tmp/ first, the ova can be obtained from my.vmware.com, ensure that it has chmod 644 permissions.
cse template import -F /tmp/ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.20.5-vmware.2-tkg.1-6700972457122900687.ova
# You may need to enable 644 permissions on the file if cse complains that the file is not readable.
# Install CSE
cse install -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Or use this if you've already installed and want to skip template creation again
cse upgrade --skip-template-creation -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Register the cse extension with vcd if it did not already register
vcd system extension create cse cse cse vcdext '/api/cse, /api/cse/.*, /api/cse/.*/.*'
# Setup cse.sh
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh << EOF
#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
cse run
EOF
# Make cse.sh executable
chmod +x /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
# Deactivate the python virtual environment and go back to root
deactivate
exit
# Setup cse.service, use MQTT and not RabbitMQ
cat > /etc/systemd/system/cse.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Container Service Extension for VMware Cloud Director
[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
User=cse
WorkingDirectory=/opt/vmware/cse
Type=simple
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
EOF
systemctl enable cse.service
systemctl start cse.service
systemctl status cse.service
Enable the CSE UI Plugin for VCD
The new CSE UI extension is bundled with VCD 10.3.1.
Enable it for the tenants that you want or for all tenants.
For 3.1.1 you will also need to edit the cse:nativeCluster Entitlement Rights Bundle and add the two following rights:
ACCESS CONTROL, User, Manage user’s own API token
COMPUTE, Organization VDC, Create a Shared Disk
Then publish the Rights Bundle to all tenants.
Enable Global Roles to use CSE or Configure Rights Bundles
The quickest way to get CSE working is to add the relevant rights to the Organization Administrator role. You can create a custom rights bundle and create a custom role for the k8s admin tenant persona if you like. I won’t cover that in this post.
Log in as the /Provider and go to the Administration menu and click on Global Roles on the left.
Edit the Organization Administrator role and scroll all the way down to the bottom and click both the View 8/8 and Manage 12/12, then Save.
Setting up VCD CSI and CPI Operators
You may notice that when the cluster is up you might not be able to deploy any pods, this is because the cluster is not ready and is in a tainted state due to the CSI and CPI Operators not having the credentials.
This article describes how to setup vCenter, VCD, NSX-T and NSX Advanced Load Balancer to support exposing Kubernetes applications in Kubernetes clusters provisioned into VCD.
At the end of this post, you would be able to run this command:
… and have NSX ALB together with VCD and NSX-T automate the provisioning and setup of everything that allows you to expose that application to the outside world using a Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer.
This article describes how to setup vCenter, VCD, NSX-T and NSX Advanced Load Balancer to support exposing Kubernetes applications in Kubernetes clusters provisioned into VCD.
At the end of this post, you would be able to run this command:
… and have NSX ALB together with VCD and NSX-T automate the provisioning and setup of everything that allows you to expose that application to the outside world using a Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer.
Create a Content Library for NSX ALB
In vCenter (Resource vCenter managing VCD PVDCs), create a Content Library for NSX Advanced Load Balancer to use to upload the service engine ova.
Create T1 for Avi Service Engine management network
Create T1 for Avi Service Engine management network. You can either attach this T1 to the default T0 or create a new T0.
enable DHCP server for the T1
enable All Static Routes and All Connected Segments & Service Ports under Route Advertisement
Create a network segment for Service Engine management network
Create a network segment for Avi Service Engine management network. Attach the segment to the T1 the was created in the previous step.
Ensure you enable DHCP, this will assign IP addresses to the service engines automatically and you won’t need to setup IPAM profiles in Avi Vantage.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer Settings
A couple of things to setup here.
You do not need to create any tenants in NSX ALB, just use the default admin context.
No IPAM/DNS Profiles are required as we will use DHCP from NSX-T for all networks.
Use FQDNs instead of IP addresses
Use the same FQDN in all systems for consistency and to ensure that registration between the systems work
NSX ALB
VCD
NSX-T
Navigate to Administration, User Credentials and setup user credentials for NSX-T controller and vCenter server
Navigate to Administration, Settings, Tenant Settings and ensure that the settings are as follows
Setup an NSX-T Cloud
Navigate to Infrastructure, Clouds. Setup your cloud similar to mine, I have valled my NSX-T cloud nsx.vmwire.com (which is the FQDN of my NSX-T Controller).
Lets go through these settings from the top.
use the FQDN of your NSX-T manager for the name
click the DHCP option, we will be using NSX-T’s DHCP server so we can ignore IPAM/DNS later
enter something for the Object Name Prefix, this will give the SE VM name a prefix so they can be identified in vCenter. I used avi here, so it will look like this in vCenter
type the FQDN of the NSX-T manager into the NSX-T Manager Address
choose the NSX-T Manager Credentials that you configured earlier
select the Transport Zone that you are using in VCD for your tenants
under Management Network Segment, select the T1 that you created earlier for SE management networking
under Segment ID, select the network segment that you created earlier for the SE management network
click ADD under the Data Network Segment(s)
select the T1 that is used by the tenant in VCD
select the tenant organization routed network that is attached to the t1 in the previous task
the two previous settings tell NSX ALB where to place the data/vip network for front-end load balancing use. NSX-ALB will create a new segment for this in NSX-T automatically, and VCD will automatically create DNAT rules when a virtual service is requested in NSX ALB
the last step is to add the vCenter server, this would be the vCenter server that is managing the PVDCs used in VCD.
Now wait for a while until the status icon turns green and shows Complete.
Setup a Service Engine Group
Decide whether you want to use a shared service engine group for all VCD tenants or dedicated a service engine group for each Tenant.
I use the dedicated model.
navigate to Infrastructure, Service Engine Group
change the cloud to the NSX-T cloud that you setup earlier
create a new service engine group with your preferred settings, you can read about the options here.
Setup Avi in VCD
Log into VCD as a Provider and navigate to Resources, Infrastructure Resources, NSX-ALB, Controllers and click on the ADD link.
Wait for a while for Avi to sync with VCD. Then continue to add the NSX-T Cloud.
Navigate to Resources, Infrastructure Resources, NSX-ALB, NSX-T Clouds and click on the ADD link.
Proceed when you can see the status is healthy.
Navigate to Resources, Infrastructure Resources, NSX-ALB, Service Engine Groups and click on the ADD link.
Staying logged in as a Provider, navigate to the tenant that you wish to enable NSX ALB load balancing services and navigate to Networking, Edge Gateways, Load Balancer, Service Engine Groups. Then add the service engine group to this tenant.
This will enable this tenant to use NSX ALB load balancing services.
Deploy a new Kubernetes cluster in VCD with Container Service Extension
Deploy a new Kubernetes cluster using Container Service Extension in VCD as normal.
Once the cluster is ready, download the kube config file and log into the cluster.
Check that all the nodes and pods are up as normal.
You might see that the following pods in the kube-system namespace are in a pending state. If everything is already working then move onto the next section.
Wait for the load balancer service to start and the pod to go into a running state. During this time, you’ll see the service engines being provisioned automatically by NSX ALB. It’ll take 10 minutes or so to get everything up and running.
You can use this command to check when the load balancer service has completed and check the EXTERNAL-IP.
kubectl get service webserver
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
webserver LoadBalancer 100.71.45.194 10.149.1.114 80:32495/TCP 7h48m
You can see that NSX ALB, VCD and NSX-T all worked together to expose the nginx applicationto the outside world.
The external IP of 10.149.1.114 in my environment is an uplink segment on a T0 that I have configured for VCD tenants to use as egress and ingress into their organization VDC. It is the external network for their VDCs.
Paste the external IP into a web browser and you should see the nginx web page.
In the next post, I’ll go over the end to end network flow to show how this all connects NSX ALB, VCD, NSX-T and Kubernetes together.
Container Service Extension (CSE) 3.1.1 now supports persistent volumes that are backed by VCD’s Named Disk feature.
Setting up the VCD CSI driver on your Kubernetes cluster
Container Service Extension (CSE) 3.1.1 now supports persistent volumes that are backed by VCD’s Named Disk feature. These now appear under Storage – Named disks in VCD. To use this functionality today (28 September 2021), you’ll need to deploy CSE 3.1.1 beta with VCD 10.3. See this previous post for details.
Ideally, you want to deploy the CSI driver using the same user that also deployed the Kubernetes cluster into VCD. In my environment, I used a user named tenant1-admin, this user has the Organization Administrator role with the added right:
Compute – Organization VDC – Create a Shared Disk.
Create the vcloud-basic-auth.yaml
Before you can create persistent volumes you have to setup the Kubernetes cluster with the VCD CSI driver.
Ensure you can log into the cluster by downloading the kube config and logging into it using the correct context.
kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT NAME CLUSTER AUTHINFO NAMESPACE
* kubernetes-admin@kubernetes kubernetes kubernetes-admin
Create the vcloud-basic-auth.yaml file which is used to setup the VCD CSI driver for this Kubernetes cluster.
Notice that the storageProfile needs to be set to either “*” for any storage policy or the name of a storage policy that you has access to in your Organization VDC.
Create the storage class by applying that file.
kubectl apply -f storage-class.yaml
You can see if that was successful by getting all storage classes.
kubectl get storageclass
NAME PROVISIONER RECLAIMPOLICY VOLUMEBINDINGMODE ALLOWVOLUMEEXPANSION AGE
vcd-disk-dev named-disk.csi.cloud-director.vmware.com Delete Immediate false 43h
Now that we’ve got a storage class and the driver installed, we can now deploy a persistent volume claim and attach it to a pod. Lets create a persistent volume claim first.
Creating a persistent volume claim
We will need to prepare another file, I’ve called my my-pvc.yaml, and it looks like this.
kubectl get pvc
NAME STATUS VOLUME CAPACITY ACCESS MODES STORAGECLASS AGE
my-pvc Bound pvc-2ddeccd0-e092-4aca-a090-dff9694e2f04 1Gi RWO vcd-disk-dev 36m
Attaching the persistent volume to a pod
Lets deploy an nginx pod that will attach the PV and use it for nginx.
You can see that the persistentVolumeClaim, claimName: my-pvc, this aligns to the name of the PVC. I’ve also mounted it to /usr/share/nginx/html within the nginx pod.
Lets attach the PV.
kubectl apply -f pod.yaml
You’ll see a few things happen in the Recent Tasks pane when you run this. You can see that Kubernetes has attached the PV to the nginx pod using the CSI driver, the driver informs VCD to attach the disk to the worker node.
If you open up vSphere Web Client, you can see that the disk is now attached to the worker node.
You can also see the CSI driver doing its thing if you take a look at the logs with this command.
You can log into the nginx pod using this command.
kubectl exec -it pod -- bash
Then type mount and df to see the mount is present and the size of the mount point.
df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb 999320 1288 929220 1% /usr/share/nginx/html
mount
/dev/sdb on /usr/share/nginx/html type ext4 (rw,relatime)
The size is correct, being 1GB and the disk is mounted.
Describing the pod gives us more information.
kubectl describe po pod
Name: pod
Namespace: default
Priority: 0
Node: node-xgsw/192.168.0.101
Start Time: Sun, 26 Sep 2021 12:43:15 +0300
Labels: app=nginx
Annotations: <none>
Status: Running
IP: 100.96.1.12
IPs:
IP: 100.96.1.12
Containers:
my-pod-container:
Container ID: containerd://6a194ac30dab7dc5a5127180af139e531e650bedbb140e4dc378c21869bd570f
Image: nginx
Image ID: docker.io/library/nginx@sha256:853b221d3341add7aaadf5f81dd088ea943ab9c918766e295321294b035f3f3e
Port: 80/TCP
Host Port: 0/TCP
State: Running
Started: Sun, 26 Sep 2021 12:43:34 +0300
Ready: True
Restart Count: 0
Environment: <none>
Mounts:
/usr/share/nginx/html from my-pod-storage (rw)
/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount from default-token-xm4gd (ro)
Conditions:
Type Status
Initialized True
Ready True
ContainersReady True
PodScheduled True
Volumes:
my-pod-storage:
Type: PersistentVolumeClaim (a reference to a PersistentVolumeClaim in the same namespace)
ClaimName: my-pvc
ReadOnly: false
default-token-xm4gd:
Type: Secret (a volume populated by a Secret)
SecretName: default-token-xm4gd
Optional: false
QoS Class: BestEffort
Node-Selectors: <none>
Tolerations: node.kubernetes.io/not-ready:NoExecute op=Exists for 300s
node.kubernetes.io/unreachable:NoExecute op=Exists for 300s
Events: <none>
Useful commands
Show storage classes
kubectl get storageclass
Show persistent volumes and persistent volume claims
Photon OS 3 does not support Linux guest customization unfortunately, so we will use the links below to manually setup the OS with a hostname and static IP address.
Boot the VM, the default credentials are root with password changeme. Change the default password.
Photon 3 has the older repositories, so we will need to update to newer repositories as detailed in this KB article. I’ve included this in the instructions below.
Copypasta or use create a bash script.
# Update Photon repositories
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/dl.bintray.com\/vmware/packages.vmware.com\/photon\/$releasever/g' photon.repo photon-updates.repo photon-extras.repo photon-debuginfo.repo
# Update Photon
tdnf --assumeyes update
# Install dependencies
tdnf --assumeyes install build-essential python3-devel python3-pip git
# Prepare cse user and application directories
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse
chmod 775 -R /opt
chmod 777 /
groupadd cse
useradd cse -g cse -m -p Vmware1! -d /opt/vmware/cse
chown cse:cse -R /opt
# Run as cse user
su - cse
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys << EOF
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAhcw67bz3xRjyhPLysMhUHJPhmatJkmPUdMUEZre+MeiDhC602jkRUNVu43Nk8iD/I07kLxdAdVPZNoZuWE7WBjmn13xf0Ki2hSH/47z3ObXrd8Vleq0CXa+qRnCeYM3FiKb4D5IfL4XkHW83qwp8PuX8FHJrXY8RacVaOWXrESCnl3cSC0tA3eVxWoJ1kwHxhSTfJ9xBtKyCqkoulqyqFYU2A1oMazaK9TYWKmtcYRn27CC1Jrwawt2zfbNsQbHx1jlDoIO6FLz8Dfkm0DToanw0GoHs2Q+uXJ8ve/oBs0VJZFYPquBmcyfny4WIh4L0lwzsiAVWJ6PvzF5HMuNcwQ== rsa-key-20210508
EOF
cat >> ~/.bash_profile << EOF
# For Container Service Extension
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
EOF
# Install CSE in virtual environment
python3 -m venv /opt/vmware/cse/python
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
pip3 install git+https://github.com/vmware/container-service-extension.git@3.1.1.0b2
cse version
source ~/.bash_profile
# Prepare vcd-cli
mkdir -p ~/.vcd-cli
cat > ~/.vcd-cli/profiles.yaml << EOF
extensions:
- container_service_extension.client.cse
EOF
vcd cse version
# Add my Let's Encrypt intermediate and root certs. Use your certificates issued by your CA to enable verify=true with CSE.
cat >> /opt/vmware/cse/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages/certifi/cacert.pem << EOF #ok
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
EOF
# Create service account
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator -p Vmware1!
cse create-service-role vcd.vmwire.com
# Enter system administrator username and password
# Create VCD service account for CSE
vcd user create --enabled svc-cse Vmware1! "CSE Service Role"
# Create config file
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse/config
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf << EOF
mqtt:
verify_ssl: false
vcd:
host: vcd.vmwire.com
log: true
password: Vmware1!
port: 443
username: administrator
verify: true
vcs:
- name: vcenter.vmwire.com
password: Vmware1!
username: administrator@vsphere.local
verify: true
service:
enforce_authorization: false
legacy_mode: false
log_wire: false
processors: 15
telemetry:
enable: true
broker:
catalog: cse-catalog
ip_allocation_mode: pool
network: default-organization-network
org: cse
remote_template_cookbook_url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/container-service-extension-templates/master/template_v2.yaml
storage_profile: 'truenas-iscsi-luns'
vdc: cse-vdc
EOF
cse encrypt /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf --output /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
chmod 600 /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse check /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse template list
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
# Add your public key(s) here
cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys << EOF
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAhcw67bz3xRjyhPLysMhUHJPhmatJkmPUdMUEZre+MeiDhC602jkRUNVu43Nk8iD/I07kLxdAdVPZNoZuWE7WBjmn13xf0Ki2hSH/47z3ObXrd8Vleq0CXa+qRnCeYM3FiKb4D5IfL4XkHW83qwp8PuX8FHJrXY8RacVaOWXrESCnl3cSC0tA3eVxWoJ1kwHxhSTfJ9xBtKyCqkoulqyqFYU2A1oMazaK9TYWKmtcYRn27CC1Jrwawt2zfbNsQbHx1jlDoIO6FLz8Dfkm0DToanw0GoHs2Q+uXJ8ve/oBs0VJZFYPquBmcyfny4WIh4L0lwzsiAVWJ6PvzF5HMuNcwQ== rsa-key-20210508
EOF
# Import TKGm ova with this command
# Copy the ova to /home/ first, the ova can be obtained from my.vmware.com, ensure that it has chmod 644 permissions.
cse template import -F /home/ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.20.5-vmware.2-tkg.1-6700972457122900687.ova
# Install CSE
cse install -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Or use this if you've already installed and want to skip template creation again
cse upgrade --skip-template-creation -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Setup cse.sh
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh << EOF
#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
cse run
EOF
# Make cse.sh executable
chmod +x /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
# Deactivate the python virtual environment and go back to root
deactivate
exit
# Setup cse.service, use MQTT and not RabbitMQ
cat > /etc/systemd/system/cse.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Container Service Extension for VMware Cloud Director
[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
User=cse
WorkingDirectory=/opt/vmware/cse
Type=simple
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
EOF
systemctl enable cse.service
systemctl start cse.service
systemctl status cse.service
Enable Global Roles to use CSE or Configure Rights Bundles
The quickest way to get CSE working is to add the relevant rights to the Organization Administrator role. You can create a custom rights bundle and create a custom role for the k8s admin tenant persona if you like. I won’t cover that in this post.
Log in as the /Provider and go to the Administration menu and click on Global Roles on the left.
Edit the Organization Administrator role and scroll all the way down to the bottom and click both the View 8/8 and Manage 12/12, then Save.
A short post on some operational tips for CSE 3.0.4. This post covers recommendations for sizing the CSE server, how to protect it from failure, finding the important log files and other tips and tricks.
A short post on some operational tips for CSE 3.0.4. This post covers recommendations for sizing the CSE server, how to protect it from failure, finding the important log files and other tips and tricks.
Important files
Backup the following files. Its a good idea to perform image level backups of the VM too.
All file locations below assume you’re using the automated method to deploy CSE.
Contains the configuration for CSE server. Ensure you keep a safe backup of both the unecrypted file, so you can make changes and keep the encrypted file in case you lose the CSE server for whatever reason.
/opt/vmware/cse/.cse_scripts/*
Here you’ll find a bunch of directories that hold the Kubernetes templates runtimes for all of the supported Kubernetes versions.
The supported templates are the TKGm ones and the native ones.
Take a backup of this entire directory. You will need this if you want to save time when you redeploy CSE into a new VM but you’ve already prepared the templates and the templates are ready in the VCD catalog.
Saving these directories and copying them to the new CSE VM will enable you to run the command:
This will skip the long process of template creation again but allow you to setup CSE on the new VM.
If you didn’t take a backup of the .cse_scripts directory and redeployed CSE with the –skip-template-creation flag and already have the templates in catalog – when you go to deploy a Kubernetes cluster with VCD you’ll see an error such as:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/opt/vmware/cse/.cse_scripts/ubuntu-16.04_k8-1.18_weave-2.6.5_rev2/mstr.sh'
How to install both native and TKGm templates
There are two cookbooks that can be used to install CSE and enable template creation into VCD. The two are
For a really easy end to end automated deployment of both native and TKGm templates, use the bash script I developed in my GitHub repository.
Use vSphere HA for the CSE server
The CSE server can not support its own high availability through multiple VMs and sharing state. In fact, CSE is designed not to hold any state and communicates entirely with VCD through the message bus either with MQTT or RabbitMQ.
Use vSphere HA with high priority to ensure that the CSE server is started quickly in the event of a loss of an ESXi host.
The following is unsupported – I’ve tested running two CSE servers using the same config.yaml file on two separate VMs and this does in fact work without any obvious errors. Since CSE is stateless and uses a message bus to function and to provide the extension capability for container service with VCD. However this is totally unsupported by VMware GSS, so don’t do this.
This configuration will support up to 50 concurrent operations. Doubling the resource will not double the number of concurrent operations as there are many variables to consider. The bottleneck would be the ability for VCD to place messages on MQTT or RabbitMQ and also VCD’s operations concurrency.
Log files
Log file location
Why?
/opt/vmware/cse/.cse-logs/cse-server-debug.log
More detailed debug logs, use this one if something fails.
/opt/vmware/cse/.cse-logs/cse-server-info.log
CSE server logs and message bus messages
File Permissions for a healthy CSE server installation
I spent some time scratching my head with this when I wrote the bash script. The script ran as root but used sudo -u cse -i to run a Python virtual environment to install CSE as the cse user, this cause some issues initially but were resolved with the following chown and chmod settings.
File
Specification
entire /opt/vmware/cse directory
chown cse:cse -R chmod 775 -R
/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
chmod 600 chown cse:cse
/opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
cse user execute permissions
CSE server service operations
systemctl start cse.service
Start the CSE service
systemctl stop cse.service
Stop the CSE service
systemctl status cse.service
Show current status
systemctl status cse.service ● cse.service - Container Service Extension for VMware Cloud Director Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/cse.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-08-24 12:47:43 UTC; 7h ago Main PID: 4154 (bash) Tasks: 19 (limit: 2368) Memory: 73.6M CGroup: /system.slice/cse.service ├─4154 bash /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh └─4155 /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/python3 /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/cse run
Use CA signed certificates
Use CA signed certificates for VCD, vCenter. In your production environments you should! Even in your test environments or home labs it is very easy to obtain CA signed certs to use from a provider such as Let’s Encrypt. I’ve in fact written about this in some of my previous posts. Here for vCD and here for the rest.
Using CA signed certs allows you to set the key verify to true in the config.yaml file.
verify=true
Doing so makes you CSE server much more secure. This also allows you to use the vcd and cse CLIs without using the -i -w flags which is logging in without verifying certs and to disable warnings respectively. This is of course unsafe.
In order to ensure end to end security between CSE server, VCD and vCenter, import the certificate chain consisting of the INTERMEDIATE and ROOT certs from the certificate authority into the certs store on the CSE server.
Yes, Kubernetes clusters deployed by CSE into VCD can be monitored with Octant. I wrote about it previously here.
All you need to do is update your local kubeconfig file with the kubconfig that you downloaded from CSE in VCD.
As long as the workstation where Octant is running can route to the Control Plane endpoint for the Kubernetes cluster, Octant can then see and provided you with its great dashboards. You can use the CSE expose feature for this if your workstation is not inside the VCD cloud.
Removing clusters that failed to deploy
Obtain the cluster UID,
On CSE run this command to obtain the UID vcd cse cluster info, look for the uid parameter, it is all the way at the bottom, copy it to your clipboard.
Open up Postman or something with curl installed.
GET https://{{vcd_public_address}}/cloudapi/1.0.0/entities/urn:vcloud:entity:cse:nativeCluster:577b8c6c-bee4-49fb-8c03-2a22390f2783
POST https://{{vcd_public_address}}/cloudapi/1.0.0/entities/urn:vcloud:entity:cse:nativeCluster:577b8c6c-bee4-49fb-8c03-2a22390f2783/resolve
DEL https://{{vcd_public_address}}/cloudapi/1.0.0/entities/urn:vcloud:entity:cse:nativeCluster:577b8c6c-bee4-49fb-8c03-2a22390f2783
If that did not work use this DEL https://{{vcd_public_address}}/cloudapi/1.0.0/entities/urn:vcloud:entity:cse:nativeCluster:577b8c6c-bee4-49fb-8c03-2a22390f2783?invokeHooks=false
Known issues
Cannot deploy TKGm runtimes with expose set to true.
If you tried to use the exposefeature when deploying a TKGm runtime it would fail. This is a known issue with CSE 3.0.4 and is being fixed, I’ll update this post when a fix is released.
Following the previous post where I described how to install Container Service Extension 3.0.4 into Photon OS 3. This post introduces an automated method of the same thing using a bash script.
You can find the details on my github account under the repository named cse.
Following the previous post where I described how to install Container Service Extension 3.0.4 into Photon OS 3. This post introduces an automated method of the same thing using a bash script.
You can find the details on my github account under the repository named cse.
Ensure it can also reach VCD on TCP 443 and vCenter servers registered in VCD on TCP 443.
SSH into the Photon VM
Note that my environment has CA signed SSL certs and the script has been tested against this environment. I have not tested the script in environments with self-signed certificates.
Download cse-install.sh script to Photon VM
# Download the script to the Photon VM
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hugopow/cse/main/cse-install.sh --output cse-install.sh
# Make script executable
chmod +x cse-install.sh
Change the cse-install.sh script
Make sure you change passwords, CA SSL certificates and environment variables to suit your environment.
In my previous post I used CentOS to run the CSE server. CentOS is unofficially dead so I thought I’d replace the CSE server with Photon instead. This guide details the steps to get CSE running on Photon 3 with a non-root user and running CSE as a Linux service.
In my previous post I used CentOS to run the CSE server. CentOS is unofficially dead so I thought I’d replace the CSE server with Photon instead. This guide details the steps to get CSE running on Photon 3 with a non-root user and running CSE as a Linux service.
Why Photon 3 and not Photon 4?
Photon OS 4 has a newer version of Python that is not supported by CSE. CSE requires Python 3.7.x which is default for Photon 3.
Photon OS 3 does not support Linux guest customization unfortunately, so we will use the links below to manually setup the OS with a hostname and static IP address.
Boot the VM, the default credentials are root with password changeme. Change the default password.
Photon 3 has the older repositories, so we will need to update to newer repositories as detailed in this KB article. I’ve included this in the instructions below.
Copypasta or use create a bash script.
# Update Photon repositories
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/dl.bintray.com\/vmware/packages.vmware.com\/photon\/$releasever/g' photon.repo photon-updates.repo photon-extras.repo photon-debuginfo.repo
# Update Photon
tdnf update
# Install dependencies
tdnf --assumeyes install build-essential python3-devel python3-pip git
# Prepare cse user and application directories
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse
chmod 775 -R /opt
chmod 777 /
groupadd cse
useradd cse -g cse -m -p Vmware1! -d /opt/vmware/cse
chown cse:cse -R /opt
# Run as cse user
su - cse
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys << EOF
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAhcw67bz3xRjyhPLysMhUHJPhmatJkmPUdMUEZre+MeiDhC602jkRUNVu43Nk8iD/I07kLxdAdVPZNoZuWE7WBjmn13xf0Ki2hSH/47z3ObXrd8Vleq0CXa+qRnCeYM3FiKb4D5IfL4XkHW83qwp8PuX8FHJrXY8RacVaOWXrESCnl3cSC0tA3eVxWoJ1kwHxhSTfJ9xBtKyCqkoulqyqFYU2A1oMazaK9TYWKmtcYRn27CC1Jrwawt2zfbNsQbHx1jlDoIO6FLz8Dfkm0DToanw0GoHs2Q+uXJ8ve/oBs0VJZFYPquBmcyfny4WIh4L0lwzsiAVWJ6PvzF5HMuNcwQ== rsa-key-20210508
EOF
cat >> ~/.bash_profile << EOF
# For Container Service Extension
export CSE_TKG_M_ENABLED=True
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
EOF
# Install CSE in virtual environment
python3 -m venv /opt/vmware/cse/python
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
pip3 install git+https://github.com/vmware/container-service-extension.git@3.0.4
cse version
source ~/.bash_profile
# Prepare vcd-cli
mkdir -p ~/.vcd-cli
cat > ~/.vcd-cli/profiles.yaml << EOF
extensions:
- container_service_extension.client.cse
EOF
vcd cse version
# Add my Let's Encrypt intermediate and root certs. Use your certificates issued by your CA to enable verify=true with CSE.
cat >> /opt/vmware/cse/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages/certifi/cacert.pem << EOF #ok
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIFFjCCAv6gAwIBAgIRAJErCErPDBinU/bWLiWnX1owDQYJKoZIhvcNAQELBQAw
TzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxKTAnBgNVBAoTIEludGVybmV0IFNlY3VyaXR5IFJlc2Vh
cmNoIEdyb3VwMRUwEwYDVQQDEwxJU1JHIFJvb3QgWDEwHhcNMjAwOTA0MDAwMDAw
WhcNMjUwOTE1MTYwMDAwWjAyMQswCQYDVQQGEwJVUzEWMBQGA1UEChMNTGV0J3Mg
RW5jcnlwdDELMAkGA1UEAxMCUjMwggEiMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4IBDwAwggEK
AoIBAQC7AhUozPaglNMPEuyNVZLD+ILxmaZ6QoinXSaqtSu5xUyxr45r+XXIo9cP
R5QUVTVXjJ6oojkZ9YI8QqlObvU7wy7bjcCwXPNZOOftz2nwWgsbvsCUJCWH+jdx
sxPnHKzhm+/b5DtFUkWWqcFTzjTIUu61ru2P3mBw4qVUq7ZtDpelQDRrK9O8Zutm
NHz6a4uPVymZ+DAXXbpyb/uBxa3Shlg9F8fnCbvxK/eG3MHacV3URuPMrSXBiLxg
Z3Vms/EY96Jc5lP/Ooi2R6X/ExjqmAl3P51T+c8B5fWmcBcUr2Ok/5mzk53cU6cG
/kiFHaFpriV1uxPMUgP17VGhi9sVAgMBAAGjggEIMIIBBDAOBgNVHQ8BAf8EBAMC
AYYwHQYDVR0lBBYwFAYIKwYBBQUHAwIGCCsGAQUFBwMBMBIGA1UdEwEB/wQIMAYB
Af8CAQAwHQYDVR0OBBYEFBQusxe3WFbLrlAJQOYfr52LFMLGMB8GA1UdIwQYMBaA
FHm0WeZ7tuXkAXOACIjIGlj26ZtuMDIGCCsGAQUFBwEBBCYwJDAiBggrBgEFBQcw
AoYWaHR0cDovL3gxLmkubGVuY3Iub3JnLzAnBgNVHR8EIDAeMBygGqAYhhZodHRw
Oi8veDEuYy5sZW5jci5vcmcvMCIGA1UdIAQbMBkwCAYGZ4EMAQIBMA0GCysGAQQB
gt8TAQEBMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAA4ICAQCFyk5HPqP3hUSFvNVneLKYY611TR6W
PTNlclQtgaDqw+34IL9fzLdwALduO/ZelN7kIJ+m74uyA+eitRY8kc607TkC53wl
ikfmZW4/RvTZ8M6UK+5UzhK8jCdLuMGYL6KvzXGRSgi3yLgjewQtCPkIVz6D2QQz
CkcheAmCJ8MqyJu5zlzyZMjAvnnAT45tRAxekrsu94sQ4egdRCnbWSDtY7kh+BIm
lJNXoB1lBMEKIq4QDUOXoRgffuDghje1WrG9ML+Hbisq/yFOGwXD9RiX8F6sw6W4
avAuvDszue5L3sz85K+EC4Y/wFVDNvZo4TYXao6Z0f+lQKc0t8DQYzk1OXVu8rp2
yJMC6alLbBfODALZvYH7n7do1AZls4I9d1P4jnkDrQoxB3UqQ9hVl3LEKQ73xF1O
yK5GhDDX8oVfGKF5u+decIsH4YaTw7mP3GFxJSqv3+0lUFJoi5Lc5da149p90Ids
hCExroL1+7mryIkXPeFM5TgO9r0rvZaBFOvV2z0gp35Z0+L4WPlbuEjN/lxPFin+
HlUjr8gRsI3qfJOQFy/9rKIJR0Y/8Omwt/8oTWgy1mdeHmmjk7j1nYsvC9JSQ6Zv
MldlTTKB3zhThV1+XWYp6rjd5JW1zbVWEkLNxE7GJThEUG3szgBVGP7pSWTUTsqX
nLRbwHOoq7hHwg==
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
EOF
# Create service account
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator -p Vmware1!
cse create-service-role vcd.vmwire.com
# Enter system administrator username and password
# Create VCD service account for CSE
vcd user create --enabled svc-cse Vmware1! "CSE Service Role"
# Create config file
mkdir -p /opt/vmware/cse/config
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf << EOF
# Only one of the amqp or mqtt sections should be present. I am using MQTT.
#amqp: # I recommend using MQTT
# exchange: cse-ext
# host: amqp.vmware.com
# password: guest
# port: 5672
# prefix: vcd
# routing_key: cse
# username: guest
# vhost: /
mqtt:
verify_ssl: false
vcd:
api_version: '35.0'
host: vcd.vmwire.com
log: true
password: Vmware1!
port: 443
username: administrator
verify: true
# Add all vCenters that are registered in VCD
vcs:
- name: vcenter.vmwire.com
password: Vmware1!
username: administrator@vsphere.local
verify: true
service:
enable_tkg_m: true
enforce_authorization: false
log_wire: false
processors: 15
telemetry:
enable: true
broker:
catalog: cse-catalog
default_template_name: ubuntu-16.04_k8-1.21_weave-2.8.1
default_template_revision: 1
ip_allocation_mode: pool
network: default-organization-network
org: cse
remote_template_cookbook_url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/container-service-extension-templates/master/template.yaml
storage_profile: 'truenas-iscsi-luns'
vdc: cse-vdc
EOF
cse encrypt /opt/vmware/cse/config/config-not-encrypted.conf --output /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
chmod 600 /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse check /opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
cse template list
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
# Add your public key(s) here
cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys << EOF
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAhcw67bz3xRjyhPLysMhUHJPhmatJkmPUdMUEZre+MeiDhC602jkRUNVu43Nk8iD/I07kLxdAdVPZNoZuWE7WBjmn13xf0Ki2hSH/47z3ObXrd8Vleq0CXa+qRnCeYM3FiKb4D5IfL4XkHW83qwp8PuX8FHJrXY8RacVaOWXrESCnl3cSC0tA3eVxWoJ1kwHxhSTfJ9xBtKyCqkoulqyqFYU2A1oMazaK9TYWKmtcYRn27CC1Jrwawt2zfbNsQbHx1jlDoIO6FLz8Dfkm0DToanw0GoHs2Q+uXJ8ve/oBs0VJZFYPquBmcyfny4WIh4L0lwzsiAVWJ6PvzF5HMuNcwQ== rsa-key-20210508
EOF
cse install -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Or use this if you've already installed and want to skip template creation again
cse upgrade --skip-template-creation -k ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
export CSE_TKG_M_ENABLED=True
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator -p Vmware1!
vcd cse ovdc enable cse-vdc -o cse --tkg
vcd cse ovdc enable tenant1-vdc -o tenant1 --tkg
# Setup cse.sh
cat > /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh << EOF
#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /opt/vmware/cse/python/bin/activate
export CSE_CONFIG=/opt/vmware/cse/config/config.yaml
export CSE_CONFIG_PASSWORD=Vmware1!
cse run
EOF
# Make cse.sh executable
chmod +x /opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
# Deactivate the python virtual environment and go back to root
deactivate
exit
# Setup cse.service, use MQTT and not RabbitMQ
cat > /etc/systemd/system/cse.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Container Service Extension for VMware Cloud Director
[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/vmware/cse/cse.sh
User=cse
WorkingDirectory=/opt/vmware/cse
Type=simple
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
EOF
systemctl enable cse.service
systemctl start cse.service
systemctl status cse.service
Wheres the rest of the instructions?
That’s it for the Photon part, from here on in just refer to the previous post for the other bits.
What about my previous CSE server?
If you already have CSE 3.0.4 running on CentOS, you can in fact delete it from your inventory now that you have a new CSE server running on Photon. CSE has no state, CSE server communicates with VCD using MQTT (or RabbitMQ). In face, the most important file you need to keep is the config.yaml file which you could have also copied over from the previous CentOS installation.
The new installation on Photon OS will just pick up where the previous installation on CentOS left off, you will see the previously deployed Kubernetes clusters in VCD as before.
This post details how you can enable Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Container Service Extension to be accessible from outside of the cloud provider networks.
Providing great user experience to Kubernetes as a service from a cloud provider is important and as such enabling users to use their tools running on their personal devices to connect to remotely hosted Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud is a key feature of any cloud service.
This post details how you can enable Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Container Service Extension to be accessible from outside of the cloud provider networks.
Providing great user experience to Kubernetes as a service from a cloud provider is important and as such enabling users to use their tools running on their personal devices to connect to remotely hosted Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud is a key feature of any cloud service.
A brief review of VCD networking
VMware Cloud Director provides network isolation between tenants by leveraging Geneve based networking provided by NSX-T. In simple terms, a tenant can utilize any network subnet without worrying about clashing with any other tenant using the same VCD cloud.
That means that a tenant with a private address space can deploy a Kubernetes cluster and utilize internal addresses for the Control Plane and the Worker nodes. A user can then access the Control Plane endpoint from inside of the tenant’s VDC and run kubectl commands happily and this will work – using a jumpbox for example. However, doing this from outside of the organization virtual datacenter will not work. Even if you tried to setup a DNAT rule to NAT to the internal IP of the Control Plane endpoint and mapping it to an external IP on the Edge gateway.
It doesn’t work because of the x.509 certificate that gets created when kubeadm creates the Kubernetes cluster. During this phase the certificate needs to include all subject alternative names (SANS) and with CSE, there is no way for the operator to define SANs during cluster provisioning with CSE.
If you attempt to connect using the external IP of the DNAT rule, you may get an error like the below:
kubectl get nodes -A --kubeconfig=tkg-vcd.yaml
Unable to connect to the server: x509: certificate is valid for 10.96.0.1, 192.168.0.100, not 10.149.1.101
For context, 192.168.0.100 is the internal IP of the Control Plane node. 10.149.1.101 is the external IP in the external IP pool allocated to this tenant’s Edge gateway. See the high-level architecture diagram.
How can we enable a better user experience to access a Kubernetes cluster running in a provider’s cloud?
Container Service Extension has a feature called ‘expose’ that can be used during Kubernetes cluster provisioning to enable the DNAT changes to the Edge gateway as well as including the external IP into the x.509 certificate SANs. This is done automatically and at the current CSE 3.0.4 version only through the vcd cse cli. Please see my previous post to learn more.
What is supported with CSE 3.0.4?
Expose works under the following conditions
cluster deployment via vcd cse cli only, no UI
new kubernetes cluster deployments only
you can deploy a cluster without expose initially but you cannot expose it later
you can deploy a cluster with expose and then un-expose it later, however you cannot re-expose it again
you are using NSX-T for VCD networking
the tenant has an Edge gateway defined for their VDCs
you have an external IP pool assigned to the Edge gateway
expose works with both TKGm and native k8s runtimes
High Level Architecture
Deploying a Kubernetes cluster using expose
To enable this feature create a cluster config file anywhere on a terminal with the vcd cse cli installed. Below is an example of my config.yaml file, notice the lines for kind: use either TKGm for a TKGm runtime or native for a native runtime. Also change the template_name to suit the runtime.
The line under the spec section for expose: true will enable this feature.
Log into VCD using tenant credentials, by the way a tenant can use vcd cse cli to do this themselves to maintain self-service use cases. As a provider you don’t have to do this on a tenant’s behalf.
syntax is vcd login <cloud-url> <organization> <user>
You’ll see in VCD that the tasks will kick off and your new cluster will be made available soon. What VCD does during deployment is it will pick up an IP address either using DHCP or static IP pool for the internal network (geneve NSX-T segment), in my example this is an IP on the 192.168.0.0/24 range and in the organization network named default-organization-network. This IP will be assigned to the master node of the Control Plane, in my case 192.168.0.100.
VCD will also create a DNAT rule and pick up the next available IP address from the external IP pool allocated to the Edge gateway. In my example this will be 10.149.1.102.
You can review the tasks for this workflow below
Once the cluster is ready, a user will just need to download the kubeconfig file onto his workstation and use the cluster.
Notice that the Control Plane Gateway IP is not an internal IP but in fact one of the external IPs of the organization VDC.
This is also reflected in the kubeconfig file on line 5. CSE expose uses the external IP and also adds all the IPs into the SANs.
Logging into the Kubernetes cluster from outside of the cloud
As long as your workstation can route to the Control Plane Gateway IP you will be able to access the cluster from anywhere. Note that you can allocate public IP addresses directly to the Edge gateway, and in fact I work with providers who do this using BGP to the NSX-T T0. CSE expose basically uses an IP from the external network IP allocation pool.
The easiest way to test connectivity is to use kubectl like the following example.
kubectl get nodes -A --kubeconfig=/root/kubeconfig-native4.yaml
Which will have a response of
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
mstr-18nu Ready control-plane,master 13m v1.21.2
node-oh7f Ready <none> 8m4s v1.21.2
This of course corresponds to what has been deployed in VCD.
This post covers how to install CSE 3.0.4 and enable it to work with VCD 10.2.2 and TKG 1.3. It is a simplified step by step guide on how to install CSE and get up and running with VCD as quickly as possible.
This post covers how to install CSE 3.0.4 and enable it to work with VCD 10.2.2 and TKG 1.3. It is a simplified step by step guide on how to install CSE and get up and running with VCD as quickly as possible.
A Short Introduction to Container Service Extension
Container Service Extension (CSE) is a VMware vCloud Director (VCD) extension that helps tenants create and work with Kubernetes clusters.
CSE brings Kubernetes as a Service to VCD, by creating customized VM templates (Kubernetes templates) and enabling tenant users to deploy fully functional Kubernetes clusters as self-contained vApps.
CSE has a server component that installs as a VCD extension. It exposes REST API endpoint points via VCD. CSE also has a client component that plugs in vcd-cli, communicates with the CSE server via the exposed API endpoints, and facilitates VCD users to create Kubernetes clusters in VCD. The following diagram illustrates the interactions between the components.
Please refer to the official documentation for more details.
However complicated the above diagram is, I aim to make the installation process super-simple. You can use this article to get up and running more quickly than using the official documentation above.
Preparing CSE Server
Choose a Linux distribution to use for the CSE server and deploy it into your vSphere management cluster and ensure that it can route to the public interface of your VMware Cloud Director instance.
We will be using MQTT which is embedded into VCD and therefore does not need RabbitMQ.
I used a Centos 8 VM with the following settings.
[Update] I’ve recently published a new post to show how you can deploy CSE server on Photon OS and run it as a Linux service. I recommend using Photon OS instead of CentOS.
Component
Specification
Centos 8 image
CentOS-8.4.2105-x86_64-boot.iso
vCPUs
1
Memory
2GB
Network
Management Network (same as vCenter, NSX-T Manager etc)
Routes
Routable to vCD public URL and has outbound Internet access.
Other configuration
DNS, NTP, VMware Tools
Perform the following on the Centos 8 VM
yum update
yum upgrade
yum install -y yum-utils
yum groupinstall -y development
yum -y install python38 python38-pip python38-devel
easy_install-3.8 pip
pip3 install --user vcd-cli
# Add /root/.local/bin to PATH to remove path errors for vcd-cli
PATH=$PATH:/root/.local/bin
export PATH
# Check vcd cli is installed correctly
vcd version
# Check python version
python3 --version
# Uninstall cryptography and humanfriendly
pip uninstall cryptography
pip uninstall humanfriendly
# Install CSE
pip3 install git+https://github.com/vmware/container-service-extension.git@3.0.4
# Check versions
cse version
vcd cse version
# To enable the CSE client in vcd-cli, make the ~/.vcd-cli directory
mkdir ~/.vcd-cli
# create a new file in ~/.vcd-cli/profiles.yaml
vi ~/.vcd-cli/profiles.yaml
# to include the following contents in that file
extensions:
- container_service_extension.client.cse
CSE Server Configuration
Generate a sample config.yaml file
cse sample -o config.yaml
Contents of my file
# Only one of the amqp or mqtt sections should be present. I am using MQTT, which is built into VCD 10.2 and is supported by CSE 3.
#amqp:
# exchange: cse-ext
# host: amqp.vmware.com
# password: guest
# port: 5672
# prefix: vcd
# routing_key: cse
# username: guest
# vhost: /
# using verify_ssl: false as this is a demo lab
mqtt:
verify_ssl: false
vcd:
api_version: '35.0'
host: vcd.vmwire.com
log: true
password: Vmware1!
port: 443
username: administrator
verify: false
vcs:
# vcenter name needs to be in FQDN format in vCD too, see screenshots below.
- name: vcenter.vmwire.com
password: Vmware1!
username: administrator@vsphere.local
verify: false
service:
enable_tkg_m: true
enforce_authorization: false
log_wire: false
processors: 15
telemetry:
enable: true
# ensure that you have setup a dedicated organization, VDC, internet accessible network and catalog for CSE.
broker:
catalog: cse-catalog
default_template_name: ubuntu-20.04_tkgm-1.20_antrea-0.11
default_template_revision: 1
ip_allocation_mode: pool
network: default-organization-network
org: cse
remote_template_cookbook_url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/container-service-extension-templates/tkgm/template.yaml
storage_profile: 'truenas-iscsi-luns'
vdc: cse-vdc
A couple of notes on this config.yaml file.
Disable certificate verification if you do not have signed SSL certificates or this is for lab purposes and you are comfortable with this.
Create a new organization, org VDC (any allocation model), catalog, organization network (with access to the internet). See my screenshots below.
If you prefer to use an org routed network behind a NSX-T T0 then don’t forget to setup the Edge firewall and source NAT rules, I’ve provided screenshots below. Otherwise you can use a direct connect organization network backed by a port group instead. Just ensure that this network has outbound internet access.
Create a static IP pool for this organization network so that the VMs that CSE prepares can be configured with networking details.
Ensure that this new org corresponds to the settings under the broker section in the config.yaml file.
the default_template_name can correspond to any of the templates listed in this file, look for the name parameter. This file is the TKGm specific file, if you also want to support native upstream k8s then you can use this file instead. In fact you can support both at the same time. To support both, first install CSE with one config file (TKGm) and then upgrade CSE with the other config file (native). Or use my script here that does everything for you.
Read this documentation for pointers or place a comment below and I’ll help you out.
Under the vcs section, you’ll notice that you need to specify a vCenter name, this has to be the same name but in a FQDN format as the vCenter Server Instance setting under Infrastructure Resources in VCD. Like my settings below:
Once everything is ready you will need to encrypt the config file as CSE will only work with an encrypted file.
CSE will ask you for an encryption password, please keep a note of it.
Install CSE
Remove group and unnecessary permissions from the config file, CSE will complain if you don’t.
chmod 600 encrypted-config.yaml
First check the validity of the config file before installing CSE.
cse check encrypted-config.yaml
Install CSE with this command
cse install -c encrypted-config.yaml
This activity will take a long time, over an hour as CSE will do the following:
Download all of the OVAs from the template specification file. There are five templates to download
For each OVA, it will upload to the VCD cse organization catalog, in my case cse-catalog under the cse organization
Create a vApp for each catalog
Prepare the VM by download bits
Upload the VM to the catalog as a template
Once complete you’ll be able to see the following templates in the catalog. Note that I’ve enabled CSE to use both TKGm and native upstream k8s, hence the many templates listed here.
Enable CSE 2.3 Plugin in VCD
CSE 3.0.4 does not support the default CSE 2.2 plugin that is enabled by default with VCD 10.2.2. We need to disable and remove the CSE 2.2 plugin and upload and enable the CSE 2.3 plugin instead.
This plugin is available from this link on my.vmware.com.
To install it go to the /Provider portal and under More, use the Customize Portal.
And then publish the plugin to all/select Tenants.
Enable Tenant access to CSE
Note that CSE supports both TKGm and native k8s runtimes at the same time, and you can provision both with VCD.
TKG related options won’t show up in vcd-cli, unless explicitly enabled. To enable TKG options in vcd-cli, set the following environment variable
export CSE_TKG_M_ENABLED=True
First login to VCD using the vcd cli
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator --password Vmware1! -w -i
Enable Global Roles to use CSE or Configure Rights Bundles
The quickest way to get CSE working is to add the relevant rights to the Organization Administrator role. You can create a custom rights bundle and create a custom role for the k8s admin tenant persona if you like. I won’t cover that in this post.
Log in as the /Provider and go to the Administration menu and click on Global Roles on the left.
Edit the Organization Administrator role and scroll all the way down to the bottom and click both the View 8/8 and Manage 12/12, then Save.
Starting CSE
First lets check our installation
cse check encrypted-config.yaml --check-install
Run CSE from command line
# Run server in foreground
cse run --config config.yaml
# Run server in background
nohup cse run --config config.yaml > nohup.out 2>&1 &
You can also run CSE as a service, please refer to this link if you prefer to do this instead.
Deploying a TKG cluster as a Tenant
Congratulations, now we’re ready to deploy a k8s cluster.
Log into VCD as a tenant and go to More, Kubernetes Container Clusters.
Click on New and you should now see an option to deploy a Native Kubernetes runtime or a VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime. VCD also supports vSphere with Tanzu as well (which is not installed as part of this article). You’ll see a third tile here if you did enable vSphere with Tanzu (TKGs).
On the next page, give the k8s cluster a name, select a runtime and optionally paste in your SSH public key for easier access to the Kubernetes cluster later.
Proceed as following screenshots.
CSE 3.0.4 does not support multi-master, i.e., more than one node for the Control Plane. This is coming in a future release.
Next select the storage policies that the Control Plane node and the Worker node(s) will be deployed into. You can also opt to deploy another node to use as persistent volumes through NFS.
Select the network.
Review the final page and click on Finish. CSE will now deploy the TKG cluster for you and it will be ready once all nodes are up and running. You’ll see the following once ready.
Which you can also see with this command in CSE
vcd cse cluster list
[root@cse .vcd-cli]# vcd cse cluster list
Name Org Owner VDC K8s Runtime K8s Version Status
------ ------- ------------- ----------- ------------- ---------------- ----------------
tkg tenant1 tenant1-admin tenant1-vdc native upstream 1.14.10 CREATE:SUCCEEDED
Only thing left to do is download the Kube Config file and login with kubectl.
Useful commands
# Login to VCD
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com system administrator --password Vmware1! -w -i
# Register CSE extension with VCD
vcd system extension create cse cse cse vcdext '/api/cse, /api/cse/.*, /api/cse/.*/.*'
# List VCD extentions
vcd system extension list
# Describe CSE extension
vcd system extension info cse
# Describe CSE configuration
vcd cse system info
# List organization VDCs with CSE enabled
vcd cse ovdc list
# Enable CSE for org VDC
vcd cse ovdc enable --native --org tenant1 tenant1-vdc
# Look at CSE logs
cat /root/.cse-logs/cse-server-info.log, /root/.cse-logs/cse-server-debug.log
# Tail the CSE logs
tail -f /root/.cse-logs/cse-server-info.log, /root/.cse-logs/cse-server-debug.log
# Upgrading CSE or changing config file parameters, e.g., changing verify_ssl certs to true, note the skip-template-creation which will save you a lot of time
cse upgrade --config <config_file> --skip-template-creation
# Get infor for a cluster named tkg
vcd cse cluster info tkg
# Login as a tenant user
vcd login vcd.vmwire.com tenant1 tenant1-admin -i -w
# Deploy tkg cluster using the command line
vcd cse cluster apply tkg7.yaml
Copy the appliance update package to one of the appliances, directly into the transfer share so that you don’t have to do this for all the appliances in your cluster.
Once copied do the following on the first primary appliance.
root@vcd01 [ /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer ]# ls VMware_Cloud_Director_10.2.0.5190-17029810_update.tar.gz cells appliance-nodes responses.properties
root@vcd01 [ /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer ]# vamicli update --check Checking for available updates, this process can take a few minutes…. Available Updates - 10.2.0.5190 Build 17029810
2020-10-16 08:41:01 | Invoking Database backup utility 2020-10-16 08:41:01 | Command line usage to create embedded PG DB backup: create-db-backup 2020-10-16 08:41:01 | Using "vcloud" as default PG DB to backup since DB_NAME is not provided 2020-10-16 08:41:01 | Creating back up directory /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/pgdb-backup if it does not already exist … 2020-10-16 08:41:01 | Creating the "vcloud" DB backup at /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/pgdb-backup… 2020-10-16 08:41:03 | "vcloud" DB backup has been successfully created. 2020-10-16 08:41:03 | Copying the primary node's properties and certs … 2020-10-16 08:41:04 | "vcloud" DB backup, Properties files and certs have been successfully saved to /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/pgdb-backup/db-backup-2020-10-16-084101.tgz.
Note: To restore the postgres DB dump copy this tar file to the remote system.
Welcome to the VMware Cloud Director upgrade utility Verify that you have a valid license key to use the version of the VMware Cloud Director software to which you are upgrading. This utility will apply several updates to the database. Please ensure you have created a backup of your database prior to continuing.
Do you wish to upgrade the product now? [Y/N] y
Examining database at URL: jdbc:postgresql://172.16.2.28:5432/vcloud?socketTimeout=90&ssl=true The next step in the upgrade process will change the VMware Cloud Director database schema.
Backup your database now using the tools provided by your database vendor.
Enter [Y] after the backup is complete. y
Running 5 upgrade tasks Executing upgrade task: Successfully ran upgrade task Executing upgrade task: Successfully ran upgrade task Executing upgrade task: Successfully ran upgrade task Executing upgrade task: …..\Successfully ran upgrade task Executing upgrade task: ……………[15] Successfully ran upgrade task Database upgrade complete Upgrade complete
Would you like to start the Cloud Director service now? If you choose not to start it now, you can manually start it at any time using this command: service vmware-vcd start
root@vcd02 [ /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer ]# vamicli update --check Checking for available updates, this process can take a few minutes…. Available Updates - 10.2.0.5190 Build 17029810
root@vcd02 [ /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer ]# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator cell --shutdown Please enter the administrator password: Cell successfully deactivated and all tasks cleared in preparation for shutdown
Let’s Encrypt (LE) is a certificate authority that issues free SSL certificates for use in your web applications. This post details how to get LE setup to support Cloud Director specifically with a wildcard certificate.
Let’s Encrypt (LE) is a certificate authority that issues free SSL certificates for use in your web applications. This post details how to get LE setup to support Cloud Director specifically with a wildcard certificate.
Certbot
LE uses an application called certbot to request, automatically download and renew certificates. You can think of certbot as the client for LE.
First you’ll need to create a client machine that can request certificates from LE. I started with a simple CentOS VM. For more details about installing certbot into your preferred OS read this page here.
Once you get yours on the network with outbound internet access, you can start by performing the following.
# Update software
yum update
# Install wget if not already installed
yum install wget
# Download the certbot application.
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
# Move certbot into a local application directory
sudo mv certbot-auto /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
# Set ownership to root
sudo chown root /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
# Change permisssions for certbot
sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
Now you’re ready to request certificates. Run the following command but of course replacing your desired domain within the ‘your.domain.here ‘.
This will create a request for a wildcard certificate for *.vmwire.com.
You’ll then be asked to create a new DNS TXT record on your public DNS server for the domain that you are requesting to validate that you can manage that domain. Here’s what mine looks like for the above.
This means that you can only request public certificates with LE, private certificates are not supported.
You will then see a response from LE such as the following:
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
/root/.certbot/live/vmwire.com/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at:
/root/.certbot/live/vmwire.com/privkey.pem
Your cert will expire on 2020-12-24. To obtain a new or tweaked
version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot-auto
again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
"certbot-auto renew"
Updating Cloud Director certificates
Before you can use new certificate, you need to perform some operations with the JAVA Keytool to import the pem formatted certificates into the certificates.ks file that Cloud Director uses.
The issued certificate is available in the directory
/root/.certbot/live/
Navigate to there using an SSH client and you’ll see a structure like this
Download the entire folder for the next steps. Within the folder you’ll see the following files
Filename
Purpose
cert.pem
your certificate in pem format
chain.pem
the Let’s Encrypt root CA certificate in pem format
fullchain.pem
your wildcard certificate AND the LE root CA certificate in pem format
privkey.pem
the private key for your certificate (without passphrase)
We need to rename the file to something that the JAVA Keytool can work with. I renamed mine to the following:
Original filename
New Filename
cert.pem
vmwire-com.crt
chain.pem
vmwire-com-ca.crt
fullchain.pem
not needed
privkey.pem
vmwire-com.key
Copy the three new files to one of the Cloud Director cells, use the /tmp directory.
Now launch an SSH session to one of the Cloud Director cells and perform the following.
# Import the certificate and the private key into a new pfx format certificate
openssl pkcs12 -export -out /tmp/vmwire-com.pfx -inkey /tmp/vmwire-com.key -in /tmp/vmwire-com.crt
# Create a new certificates.ks file and import the pfx formatted certificate
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storepass Vmware1! -keypass Vmware1! -storetype JCEKS -importkeystore -srckeystore /tmp/vmwire-com.pfx -srcstorepass Vmware1!
# Change the alias for the first entry to be http
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -changealias -alias 1 -destalias http -storepass Vmware1!
# Import the certificate again, this time creating alias 1 again (we will use the same wildcard certifiate for the consoleproxy)
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storepass Vmware1! -keypass Vmware1! -storetype JCEKS -importkeystore -srckeystore /tmp/vmwire-com.pfx -srcstorepass Vmware1!
# Change the alias for the first entry to be consoleproxy
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -changealias -alias 1 -destalias consoleproxy -storepass Vmware1!
# Import the root certificate into the certificates.ks file
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -importcert -alias root -file /tmp/vmwire-com-ca.crt -storetype JCEKS -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storepass Vmware1!
# List all the entries, you should now see three, http, consoleproxy and root
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -list -keystore /tmp/certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass Vmware1!
# Stop the Cloud Director service on all cells
service vmware-vcd stop
# Make a backup of the current certificate
mv /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/certificates.ks /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/certificates.ks.old
# Copy the new certificate to the Cloud Director directory
cp /tmp/certificates.ks /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/
# List all the entries, you should now see three, http, consoleproxy and root
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin/keytool -list -keystore /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/certificates.ks -storetype JCEKS -storepass Vmware1!
# Reconfigure the Cloud Director application to use the new certificate
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/configure
# Start the Cloud Director application
service vmware-vcd start
# Monitor startup logs
tail -f /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/cell.log
Copy the certificates.ks file to the other cells and perform the configure on the other cells to update the certificates for all cells. Don’t forget to update the certificate on the load balancer too. This other post shows how to do it with the NSX-T load balancer.
This post describes how to use the NSX-T Policy API to automate the creation of load balancer configurations for Cloud Director and the vRealize Operations Tenant App.
This post describes how to use the NSX-T Policy API to automate the creation of load balancer configurations for Cloud Director and the vRealize Operations Tenant App.
Postman collection
I’ve included a Postman collection that contains all of the necessary API calls to get everything configured. There is also a Postman environment that contains the necessary variables to successfully configure the load balancer services.
To get started import the collection and environment into Postman.
You’ll see the collection in Postman named NSX-T Load Balancer Setup. All the steps are numbered to import certificates, configure the Cloud Director load balancer services. I’ve also included the calls to create the load balancer services for the vRealize Operations Tenant App.
Before you run any of those API calls, you’ll first want to import the Postman environment. Once imported you’ll see the environments in the top right screen of Postman, the environment is called NSX-T Load Balancer Setup.
Complete your environment variables.
Variable
Value Description
nsx_vip
nsx-t manager cluster virtual ip
nsx-manager-user
nsx-t manager username, usually admin
nsx-manager-password
nsx-t manager password
vcd-public-ip
public ip address for the vcd service to be configured on the load balancer
tenant-app-public-ip
public ip address for the tenant app service to be configured on the load balancer
vcd-cert-name
a name for the imported vcd http certificate
vcd-cert-private-key
vcd http certificate private key in pem format, the APIs only accept single line and no spaces in the certificate chain, use \n as an end of line character.
vcd http certificate in pem format, the APIs only accept single line and no spaces in the certificate chain, use \n as an end of line character.
For example: —–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–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\nMrToTA==\n—–END CERTIFICATE—–
ca-cert-name
a name for the imported ca root certificate
ca-certificate
ca root certificate in pem format, the APIs only accept single line and no spaces in the certificate chain, use \n as an end of line character.
vcd-node1-name
the hostname for the first vcd appliance
vcd-node1-ip
the dmz ip address for the first vcd appliance
vcd-node2-name
the hostname for the second vcd appliance
vcd-node2-ip
the dmz ip address for the second vcd appliance
vcd-node3-name
the hostname for the third vcd appliance
vcd-node3-ip
the dmz ip address for the third vcd appliance
tenant-app-node-name
the hostname for the vrealize operations tenant app appliance
tenant-app-node-ip
the dmz ip address for the vrealize operations tenant app appliance
tenant-app-cert-name
a name for the imported tenant app certificate
tenant-app-cert-private-key
tenant app certificate private key in pem format, the APIs only accept single line and no spaces in the certificate chain, use \n as an end of line character.
tenant app certificate in pem format, the APIs only accept single line and no spaces in the certificate chain, use \n as an end of line character.
For example: —–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–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\nMrToTA==\n—–END CERTIFICATE—–
tier1-full-path
the full path to the nsx-t tier1 gateway that will run the load balancer,
for example /infra/tier-1s/stage1-m-ec01-t1-gw01
vcd-dmz-segment-name
the portgroup name of the vcd dmz portgroup,
for example stage1-m-vCDFront
allowed_ip_a
an ip address that is allowed to access the /provider URI and the admin API
allowed_ip_b
an ip address that is allowed to access the /provider URI and the admin API
Variables
Now you’re ready to run the calls.
The collection and environment are available to download from Github.
VMwire 