VDS Profiles in VCF for Multi-VDS SDDC Bringup

Last week I tried my hands on latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (4.0.1) and came across a cool feature where we can bringup a SDDC with Multi-VDS and Multi-NIC (more than 2) for traffic separation. This is one of the most asked feature request by VCF customers and finally its available.

What is VDS Profile and what problem it is solving?

VCF configuration workbook has now got a new configuration setting called “vSphere Distributed Switch Profile” and this setting is available under Hosts & Networks tab.

VDS profile allow you to deploy a SDDC with custom VDS design. In earlier versions of VCF, when you do a SDDC bringup, no matter how many physical nic’s your server’s has got, only 2 of them were being utilized in bringup.  The additional NIC’s were just laying waste there. 

Imagine you are a Cloud Service Provider, and you have invested heavily in servers with 4 or 6 NIC’s.Read More

VCD Container Service Extension Series-Part 4: Tenant Onboarding & K8 Cluster Deployment

In last post of this series, we learn how to install and integrate CSE plugin with VCD for easier management of Kubernetes container. In this post we will learn how tenants can leverage CSE plugin to deploy K8 clusters.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series.

1: Container Service Extension Introduction & Architecture

2: CSE Server Installation

3: CSE Plugin Integration With VCD

Onboarding Tenants

Before a tenant can start provisioning K8 cluster from CLI or UI (via CSE plugin), we need to enable the tenant to do so. This can be done directly from CSE server or login to any machine where vcd-cli utility is installed. To onboard a tenant, use following commands:

Note: These commands needs to be run as VCD system admin. 

# vcd login vcd.vstellar.local system admin -iw

# vcd right add -o <org-name> “{cse}:CSE NATIVE DEPLOY RIGHT”

Example: # vcd right add -o cse_org “{cse}:CSE NATIVE DEPLOY RIGHT”

Rights added to the Org ‘cse_org’

Note: At this point of time, if we run command vcd cse ovdc list, it will show us no K8 provider has been configured for the tenants.Read More

VCD Container Service Extension Series-Part 3: CSE Plugin Integration With VCD

In last post of this series, I explained how to set up CSE server. In this post we will look at steps of integrating CSE plugin in VMware Cloud Director, so that tenants can spin K8’s cluster from VCD portal.

If you have landed directly on this post by mistake, I would recommend reading previous articles from this series.

1: Container Service Extension Introduction & Architecture

2: CSE Server Installation

Latest and greatest version of CSE plugin can be downloaded from Here

CSE plugin installation is taken care by Cloud Provider. Post installation, provider can choose to publish plugin to all/specific tenants.

Login to VCD as system admin and navigate to Home > More > Plugins page. 

CSE-Plugin01

Click on upload button to start the wizard. Clicking on Select Plugin File allow you to browse to location where plugin file is downloaded.

CSE-Plugin02

Select the scope of publishing CSE plugin. Service provider can publish this plugin to all or subset of tenants. Read More