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Version: 3.1

Portworx vSphere generic spec generation

Step 1: vCenter user for Portworx​

Provide Portworx with a vCenter server user that has the following minimum vSphere privileges using your vSphere console:

  • Datastore

    • Allocate space
    • Browse datastore
    • Low level file operations
    • Remove file

  • Host

    • Local operations
    • Reconfigure virtual machine

  • Virtual machine

    • Change Configuration
    • Add existing disk
    • Add new disk
    • Add or remove device
    • Advanced configuration
    • Change Settings
    • Extend virtual disk
    • Modify device settings
    • Remove disk

    If you create a custom role as above, make sure to select Propagate to children when assigning the user to the role.

    Why select Propagate to Children ?

    In vSphere, resources are organized hierarchically. By selecting "Propagate to Children," you ensure that the permissions granted to the custom role are automatically applied not just to the targeted object, but also to all objects within its sub-tree. This includes VMs, datastores, networks, and other resources nested under the selected resource.

note

All commands in the subsequent steps need to be run on a machine with kubectl access.

Step 2: Create a Kubernetes secret with your vCenter user and password​

  1. Get VCenter user and password by running the following commands:

    • For VSPHERE_USER: echo '<vcenter-server-user>' | base64
    • For VSPHERE_PASSWORD: echo '<vcenter-server-password>' | base64

Note the output of both commands for use in the next step.

  1. Update the following Kubernetes Secret template by using the values obtained in step 1 for VSPHERE_USER and VSPHERE_PASSWORD.

    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Secret
    metadata:
      name: px-vsphere-secret
      namespace: <px-namespace>
    type: Opaque
    data:
      VSPHERE_USER: XXXX
      VSPHERE_PASSWORD: XXXX

  2. Apply the above spec to update the spec with your VCenter username and password:

    kubectl apply -f <updated-secret-template.yaml>

Step 3: Generate the specs​

vSphere environment details​

Export the following environment variables based on your vSphere environment. These variables will be used in a later step when generating the YAML spec.

# Hostname or IP of your vCenter server
export VSPHERE_VCENTER=myvcenter.net

# Prefix of your shared ESXi datastore(s) names. Portworx will use datastores who names match this prefix to create disks.
export VSPHERE_DATASTORE_PREFIX=mydatastore-

# Change this to the port number vSphere services are running on if you have changed the default port 443
export VSPHERE_VCENTER_PORT=443

Disk templates​

A disk template defines the VMDK properties that Portworx will use as a reference for creating the actual disks out of which Portworx will create the virtual volumes for your PVCs.

The template adheres to the following format:

type=<vmdk type>,size=<size of the vmdk>
  • type: Supported types are thin, eagerzeroedthick, and lazyzeroedthick
  • size: This is the size of the VMDK in GiB

The following example will create a 150GB EagerZeroedThick VMDK on each VM:

export VSPHERE_DISK_TEMPLATE=type=eagerzeroedthick,size=150
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