vCloud Director & Container Service Extension - Part 2: Requirements

This post will depict the various requirements a Service Provider will have to fulfill to provide CSE for their end users so they can deploy & manage Kubernetes clusters.

Most of the requirements are listed on the container-service-extension documentation, but isn’t really visual, so hopefully the following diagrams should help understand how everything comes together into a working container as a service solution.

So let’s add a bit more detail to a previous diagram to showcase which APIs are into play here and refer back to the requirements for every component, and then from a vCloud Director standpoint.

vCloud Director & CSE API Logical Diagram

I wanted to highlight how AMQP plays a very important role when extending vCloud Director, and show which component is interacting with each other through the APIs and/or AMQP.

For anyone unfamiliar with AMQP, I would recommend checking out this blog post:

• Part 1: RabbitMQ for beginners - What is RabbitMQ?

Now for the 2 main components requirements

Container Service Extension (CSE)

• vCloud Director System Administrator credentials

• vSphere Administrator credentials (at the day of writing this post)

• RabbitMQ information & credentials

• Python 3:

  • pyvcloud
  • pyvmomi
  • vsphere-guest-run
  • vcd-cli
  • container-service-extension

• Network:

  • Access to vCloud Director
  • Access to vCenter Server
  • Access to RabbitMQ

vCloud Director

• Release 8.10 minimum

• System Administrator credentials

• Supported RabbitMQ instance configured

  • Check vCloud Director <-> RabbitMQ supported matrix on vCD Release Notes
  • vCloud Director 9.1 Release notes

• Catalog / Admin Organization setup:

  • Org vDC with sufficient resources to spin up the template creation process
  • Org vDC Network with Internet access (to download kubernetes components and various packages)

To illustrate the vCloud Director part, Here is a diagram that shows how your setup could look like.

vCloud Director & Admin / Catalog Organization Sample Diagram

High level steps:

1. CSE will upload vanilla templates OVA to vCloud Director in a CSE Catalog
2. CSE will deploy the template as a VM on a Org VDC Network that requires internet access.
3. CSE will guest customize the VM and add/configure all required components.
4. CSE will then validate the VM and add it back to the CSE Catalog as a valid item for deploying container hosts.

Hope this helps,

In the next blog post we will cover the Installation & Configuration part in more detail.