Creating a PvDC for Enterprise PKS in vCloud Director

If you read up on my recent blog post regarding RBAC in the new release of VMware’s Container Service Extension for vCloud Director, you may have noticed that I mentioned a follow-up post regarding the steps required to add an Enterprise PKS controlled vCenter Server to vCloud Director. I wanted to take a little bit of time to go through that process as it’s a relatively new workflow.

First of all, in our lab deployment, we are using an NSX-T backed vSphere environment to provide networking functionality to the Enterprise PKS deployment. As you may know, NSX-T integration is fairly new in the vCloud Director world (and growing every day!). With this in mind, the process of adding the vSphere/NSX-T components into vCD are a little bit different. Let’s have a look at the workflow for creating a Provider Virtual Datacenter (PvDC) that will support our tenant using CSE to provision Enterprise PKS kubernetes clusters.

Logging into the HTML5 vCloud Director Admin Portal

The first point to note is that we can only add a vSphere environment backed by NSX-T in the HTML5 admin portal in the current release of vCD (9.7 at the time of writing). Let’s navigate to https://vcd-director-url.com/provider and login:

Adding vCenter Server

First, we need to add our vCenter Server (vCSA) that is managed by Enterprise PKS to our vCD environment. Select the menu at the top of the page and select the vSphere Resources option and select the Add option above your list of existing vCSAs:

Next, we will fill out all of the required information vCD requires to connect to our vCSA. After filling out the required information, select Next:

On the NSX-V Manager section, we want to ensure that we disable the Configure Settings option here as we will be utilizing a vSphere environment backed by NSX-T, as opposed to NSX-V. After disabling the NSX-V setting, select Next:

Finally, review the configuration information and select Finish to add the vCSA to your vCD deployment:

Add NSX-T Manager

Now that we’ve adding our vCSA sans NSX-V manager, we need to add our NSX-T manager to our vCD deployment. Select the NSX-T Managers menu from the left side of the portal and then select the Add option to plug our NSX-T Manager information in:

Once we fill out the required information, we can select the Save button to finish the process:

Once we verified the action is successful in the Task menu, we are ready to create our PvDC!

Creating a PvDC with our PKS vCSA and NSX-T Manager

Normally, we would be able to create PvDCs in the WebUI but for PvDCs that are backed by NSX-T, we can only create them via the API. We will use the vcd-cli to accomplish this. First, we need to log in to the as a cloud admin user

$ vcd login vcd.example.com System administrator -iw
Password:
administrator logged in, org: 'System', vdc: ''

Now, we use the following command to create our new PvDC where:

• "PKS-PVDC" is the name of our new PvDC • "ent-cse-vcsa" is the name of our newly added vCSA • "pks-nsx-t-mgr" is the name of our newly added NSX-T manager • "*" is our storage profile • "pks-cluster" is our resource pool • "--enable" to ensure the PvDC is enabled upon creation

vcd pvdc create PKS-PVDC ent-cse-vcsa -t pks-nsx-t-mgr -s "*" -r pks-cluster -–enable

Now, let’s navigate back to the portal to ensure the PvDC is present and enabled. Select the Cloud Resources options from the top menu and the Provider VDCs option from the left menu:

Create our Organization and Organization Virtual Datacenters

Now that we’ve built our PvDC out, we are ready to create our tenant org and create a virtual datacenter for that tenant to utilize for their Enterprise PKS workloads.

First, navigate to the Organizations option on the left menu and select the Add option above the list of orgs:

Fill out the required information to create the org and select the Create button:

We now need to create an Organization Virtual Datacenter (OvDC) to support our org. Select the Organization VDC option from the left menu and select the New button:

I won’t walk through the options here as it’s well documented but you will need to define your Organization, PvDC, Allocation Model, Allocation Pool, Storage Policies, and Network Pool so users in your tenant org have resources to use when provisioning.

At this point, we have done all the pre-work required and we’re ready to connect this OrgVDC to our Container Service Extension instance and start provisioning our Enterprise PKS clusters in vCD!!