Overview
There are scenarios where it is both impractical and impossible to follow a traditional cloud provisioning model where the latest software is downloaded and provisioned on the fly. For scenarios like this, “pre-packaged” images are provided that contains the Operating System, Kubernetes cluster components, Kubernetes Mgmt Operator and critical 3rd party software addons.
For example
-
An on-premises location with limited Internet connectivity or a factory environment where clusters need to be provisioned on 100s of servers in a day.
-
An ephemeral QA environment where it is impractical to download the software repeatedly over the Internet.
With the pre-packaged image based provisioning option, it is possible to provision a fully operational, centrally managed upstream Kubernetes cluster in minutes without having to download anything over the network/Internet. It is important to note that this workflow still requires the cluster to be able to connect to the Controller for activation, registration and configuration.
Note
This document describes the GUI based, step-by-step workflow for the provisioning and activation process. The entire workflow can be performed entirely programmatically using Controller’s REST APIs. This allows organizations to completely embed this into their workflows/processes requiring zero manual intervention.
Assumptions¶
- The user is familiar with hypervisors like vSphere and optionally Orchestration using CloudInit.
- You will perform the provisioning using the Web Console
Requirements¶
A hypervisor (e.g. vSphere 5.5) capable of importing OVA images.
Download OVA image¶
The OVA image comprises the following components. These are frequently updated to ensure the image is kept current. These are also dynamically updated during provisioning. The image is ~4 GB in size. This has to be downloaded only once. The same image can be reused as many times as necessary
| Bundled Component |
|---|
| Operating System (64-bit Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) |
| Kubernetes (v1.25.2) |
| k8s Mgmt Operator |
| Add-ons for Monitoring, Logging and Ingress Controller Components |
Important
The OVA comes bundled with certain versions of required software. If an alternate version is selected during provisioning, the required sofware will be automatically downloaded during the provisioning process. Ensure you allocate sufficient time and bandwidth to accommodate for the software downloads.
Image Versioning
The following versioning and naming convention is used for the images. For example, “rafay-clusterimage-r1.3.0.ova” is the 1.3.0 release. This release is compatible with 1.3.0 or higher of the Controller.
“rafay-clusterimage-r-vMajor.vMinor.vPatch.ova"
v1.21¶
| Type | Hash |
|---|---|
| MD5 | fb56e678f8d842ebe5d283ad3d596862 |
| SHA256 | 9aa9ddecf1b1c69a2c4d6f35a43c7c66cfb29d9d40d79e30b7cca3e878ea1d09 |
Cloud Init¶
Upon request, we can provide illustrative examples for Cloud Init templates that help streamline and automate a number of steps during the instantiation of the Operating System. Customers can customize and extend these to suit their specific requirements.
Specifically, the Cloud Init templates implement and automate the following steps:
- Configuration of CPU, Memory and Storage for the VM
- Day 0 network configuration
- Day 0 iptables config [currently inbound rules for tcp port 80 and 443 only]
- Automated execution of the conjurer binary for auto registration of the VM with the Controller