Objective
This guide introduces Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and the possibilities for its integration into your Hosted Private Cloud powered by VMware solution.
Requirements
- Being an administrative contact of your Hosted Private Cloud infrastructure to receive login credentials
- A user account with access to the OVHcloud Control Panel
- A user account with access to vSphere
Step-by-step introduction to the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid solution
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a Kubernetes platform provided by VMware and maintained as part of the Hosted Private Cloud powered by VMware solution.
You can deploy this product on your OVHcloud infrastructure to take advantage of its features and scalability.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid enables you to deploy and manage one or more Kubernetes clusters within your VMware infrastructure. The administration tool for these clusters is itself based on Kubernetes.
Initial installation of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
Please refer to the Install Tanzu Kubernetes Grid documentation for installation.
Running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on the VMware cluster requires six new virtual machines to run the management cluster. Another virtual machine is required for administration, this virtual machine is provided by OVHcloud and is called Bootstrap.
The management cluster must be used exclusively for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid administration.
Deploying a Workload cluster and installing an application
To deploy an application, you need to create WorkLoad clusters that are dedicated to applications.
All WorkLoad clusters are independent from one another, which means you can have different versions of Kubernetes on each of these Workload clusters.
When installing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, we chose kube-vip for interconnections between aWorkloadcluster and the VMware cluster network. You can also use the Nsx Advanced Load Balancer.
Read the Installing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guide to deploy a Workload cluster and application.
For each new WorkLoad cluster installed in production mode, six new virtual machines are added to your VMware infrastructure.
An application can consist of multiple pods that communicate with each other through the internal network of the workload cluster. Some ports are opened on the VMware cluster network using the kube-vip module.
Managing persistent volumes
By default, when stopping a pod, if it crashes, the data in that pod is lost. To store data permanently, you need to create persistent volumes and associate them with applications.
Persistent volumes are stored by default on VMware storage (vSAN orNFS) that was used for the WorkLoad cluster deployment, using VMware APIs (vSphere Cloud Native Storage).
You can create Custom Storage Classes to define another location.
Read the Managing Persistent Volumes in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guide to add an application that uses an external persistent volume.
Application backup
Various backup solutions compatible with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid exist, including Kasten from Veeam.