# vSphere cloud provider

Kubespray can be deployed with vSphere as Cloud provider. This feature supports

- Volumes
- Persistent Volumes
- Storage Classes and provisioning of volumes.
- vSphere Storage Policy Based Management for Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes.

## Prerequisites

You need at first to configure your vSphere environment by following the [official documentation](https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/vsphere/#vsphere-cloud-provider).

After this step you should have:

- UUID activated for each VM where Kubernetes will be deployed
- A vSphere account with required privileges

If you intend to leverage the [zone and region node labeling](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubernetes-api/labels-annotations-taints/#failure-domain-beta-kubernetes-io-region), create a tag category for both the zone and region in vCenter.  The tags can then be applied at the host, cluster, datacenter, or folder level, and the cloud provider will walk the hierarchy to extract and apply the labels to the Kubernetes nodes.

## Kubespray configuration

First you must define the cloud provider in `inventory/sample/group_vars/all.yml` and set it to `vsphere`.

```yml
cloud_provider: vsphere
```

Then, in the same file, you need to declare your vCenter credential following the description below.

| Variable                     | Required | Type    | Choices                    | Default | Comment                                                                                                                                                                                       |
|------------------------------|----------|---------|----------------------------|---------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| vsphere_vcenter_ip           | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | IP/URL of the vCenter                                                                                                                                                                         |
| vsphere_vcenter_port         | TRUE     | integer |                            |         | Port of the vCenter API. Commonly 443                                                                                                                                                         |
| vsphere_insecure             | TRUE     | integer | 1, 0                       |         | set to 1 if the host above uses a self-signed cert                                                                                                                                            |
| vsphere_user                 | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | User name for vCenter with required privileges                                                                                                                                                |
| vsphere_password             | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | Password for vCenter                                                                                                                                                                          |
| vsphere_datacenter           | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | Datacenter name to use                                                                                                                                                                        |
| vsphere_datastore            | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | Datastore name to use                                                                                                                                                                         |
| vsphere_working_dir          | TRUE     | string  |                            |         | Working directory from the view "VMs and template" in the   vCenter where VM are placed                                                                                                       |
| vsphere_scsi_controller_type | TRUE     | string  | buslogic, pvscsi, parallel | pvscsi  | SCSI controller name. Commonly "pvscsi".                                                                                                                                                      |
| vsphere_vm_uuid              | FALSE    | string  |                            |         | VM Instance UUID of virtual machine that host K8s master. Can be retrieved from instanceUuid property in VmConfigInfo, or as vc.uuid in VMX file or in `/sys/class/dmi/id/product_serial` (Optional, only used for Kubernetes <= 1.9.2) |
| vsphere_public_network       | FALSE    | string  |                            | Blank   | Name of the   network the VMs are joined to                                                                                                                                                   |
| vsphere_resource_pool        | FALSE    | string  |                            | Blank   | Name of the Resource pool where the VMs are located (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.9.2)                                                                                                                                                 |
| vsphere_zone_category        | FALSE    | string  |                            |         | Name of the tag category used to set the `failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone` label on nodes (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.12.0)                                                                                                                                                 |
| vsphere_region_category      | FALSE    | string  |                            |         | Name of the tag category used to set the `failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/region` label on nodes (Optional, only used for Kubernetes >= 1.12.0)                                                                                                                                                 |

Example configuration

```yml
vsphere_vcenter_ip: "myvcenter.domain.com"
vsphere_vcenter_port: 443
vsphere_insecure: 1
vsphere_user: "k8s@vsphere.local"
vsphere_password: "K8s_admin"
vsphere_datacenter: "DATACENTER_name"
vsphere_datastore: "DATASTORE_name"
vsphere_working_dir: "Docker_hosts"
vsphere_scsi_controller_type: "pvscsi"
vsphere_resource_pool: "K8s-Pool"
```

## Deployment

Once the configuration is set, you can execute the playbook again to apply the new configuration

```ShellSession
cd kubespray
ansible-playbook -i inventory/sample/hosts.ini -b -v cluster.yml
```

You'll find some useful examples [here](https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/tree/master/staging/volumes/vsphere) to test your configuration.
