VSphere

vSphere

Permissions listed here are permission required by the Kubermatic machine-controller. Terraform, and components deployed by KubeOne (such as external cloud-controller-manager) might require additional permissions.

VM Images

When creating worker nodes for a user cluster, the user can specify an existing image.

Supported operating systems

  • CentOS beginning with 7.4 excluding stream versions qcow2
  • Rocky Linux 8 qcow2
  • Ubuntu 20.04 ova
  • Ubuntu 22.04 ova
  • Flatcar (Stable channel) ova

Importing the OVA

  1. Go into the VSphere WebUI, select your datacenter, right click onto it and choose “Deploy OVF Template”
  2. Fill in the “URL” field with the appropriate url
  3. Click through the dialog until “Select storage”
  4. Select the same storage you want to use for your machines
  5. Select the same network you want to use for your machines
  6. Leave everything in the “Customize Template” and “Ready to complete” dialog as it is
  7. Wait until the VM got fully imported and the “Snapshots” => “Create Snapshot” button is not grayed out anymore

Importing the QCOW2

  1. Convert it to vmdk: qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2 CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.vmdk
  2. Upload it to a Datastore of your vSphere installation
  3. Create a new virtual machine that uses the uploaded vmdk as rootdisk

Modifications

Modifications like Network, disk size, etc. must be done in the ova template before creating a worker node from it.

VM Folder

During creation of a machine deployment, the machine controller creates a dedicated VM folder in the root path on the Datastore. That folder will contain all worker nodes of the machine deployment.

Permissions

The vsphere user has to have to following permissions on the correct resources:

  • Role k8c-user-vcenter

    • Granted at vcenter level, not propagated
    • Needed to customize VM during provisioning
    • Permissions
      • CNS
        • Searchable
      • Profile-driven storage
        • Profile-driven storage view
      • VirtualMachine
        • Provisioning
          • Modify customization specification
          • Read customization specifications

  • Role k8c-user-datacenter

    • Granted at datacenter level, not propagated
    • Needed for cloning the template VM (obviously this is not done in a folder at this time)
    • Permissions
      • Datastore
        • Allocate space
        • Browse datastore
        • Low level file operations
        • Remove file
      • vApp
        • vApp application configuration
        • vApp instance configuration
      • Virtual Machine
        • Change CPU count
        • Memory
        • Settings
      • Inventory
        • Create from existing

  • Role k8c-user-cluster-propagate

    • Granted at cluster level, propagated
    • Needed for upload of cloud-init.iso (Ubuntu and CentOS) or defining the Ignition config into Guestinfo (CoreOS)
    • Permissions
      • Host
        • Configuration
          • Storage partition configuration
          • System Management
        • Local operations
          • Reconfigure virtual machine
      • Resource
        • Assign virtual machine to resource pool
        • Migrate powered off virtual machine
        • Migrate powered on virtual machine
      • vApp
        • vApp application configuration
        • vApp instance configuration

  • Role k8s-network-attach

    • Granted for each network that should be used (distributed switch + network)
    • Permissions
      • Network
        • Assign network

  • Role k8c-user-datastore-propagate

    • Granted at datastore / datastore cluster level, propagated
    • Permissions
      • Datastore
        • Allocate space
        • Browse datastore
        • Low level file operations

  • Role k8c-user-folder-propagate

    • Granted at VM Folder and Template Folder level, propagated
    • Needed for managing the node VMs
    • Permissions
      • Folder
        • Create folder
        • Delete folder
      • Global
        • Set custom attribute
      • Virtual machine
        • Change Configuration
        • Edit Inventory
        • Guest operations
        • Interaction
        • Provisioning
        • Snapshot management

The described permissions have been tested with vSphere 6.7 and might be different for other vSphere versions.

Terraform Setup

It’s also possible to create the roles by a terraform script. The following repo can be used as reference: