Portworx vSphere installation

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.

2. 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

3. 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

Generate the spec file

Now generate the spec with the following curl command.

note

Observe how curl below uses the environment variables setup up above as query parameters.

export VER=$(kubectl version --short | awk -Fv '/Server Version: /{print $3}')
curl -fsL -o px-spec.yaml "https://install.portworx.com/3.0?kbver=$VER&c=portworx-demo-cluster&b=true&st=k8s&csi=true&vsp=true&ds=$VSPHERE_DATASTORE_PREFIX&vc=$VSPHERE_VCENTER&s=%22$VSPHERE_DISK_TEMPLATE%22"

Apply specs

Apply the Operator and StorageCluster specs you generated in the section above using the kubectl apply command:

1. Deploy the Operator:

   kubectl apply -f 'https://install.portworx.com/<version-number>?comp=pxoperator'

   serviceaccount/portworx-operator created
   podsecuritypolicy.policy/px-operator created
   clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/portworx-operator created
   clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/portworx-operator created
   deployment.apps/portworx-operator created

2. Deploy the StorageCluster:

   kubectl apply -f 'https://install.portworx.com/<version-number>?operator=true&mc=false&kbver=&b=true&kd=type%3Dgp2%2Csize%3D150&s=%22type%3Dgp2%2Csize%3D150%22&c=px-cluster-XXXX-XXXX&eks=true&stork=true&csi=true&mon=true&tel=false&st=k8s&e==AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID%3XXXX%2CAWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY%3XXXX&promop=true'

   storagecluster.core.libopenstorage.org/px-cluster-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-8dfd338e915b created

Monitor the Portworx pods

1. Enter the following kubectl get command, waiting until all Portworx pods show as ready in the output:

   kubectl get pods -o wide -n <px-namespace> -l name=portworx

2. Enter the following kubectl describe command with the ID of one of your Portworx pods to show the current installation status for individual nodes:

   kubectl -n <px-namespace> describe pods <portworx-pod-id>

   Events:
     Type     Reason                             Age                     From                  Message
     ----     ------                             ----                    ----                  -------
     Normal   Scheduled                          7m57s                   default-scheduler     Successfully assigned <px-namespace>/portworx-qxtw4 to k8s-node-2
     Normal   Pulling                            7m55s                   kubelet, k8s-node-2   Pulling image "portworx/oci-monitor:2.5.0"
     Normal   Pulled                             7m54s                   kubelet, k8s-node-2   Successfully pulled image "portworx/oci-monitor:2.5.0"
     Normal   Created                            7m53s                   kubelet, k8s-node-2   Created container portworx
     Normal   Started                            7m51s                   kubelet, k8s-node-2   Started container portworx
     Normal   PortworxMonitorImagePullInPrgress  7m48s                   portworx, k8s-node-2  Portworx image portworx/px-enterprise:2.5.0 pull and extraction in progress
     Warning  NodeStateChange                    5m26s                   portworx, k8s-node-2  Node is not in quorum. Waiting to connect to peer nodes on port 9002.
     Warning  Unhealthy                          5m15s (x15 over 7m35s)  kubelet, k8s-node-2   Readiness probe failed: HTTP probe failed with statuscode: 503
     Normal   NodeStartSuccess                   5m7s                    portworx, k8s-node-2  PX is ready on this node

note

In your output, the image pulled will differ based on your chosen Portworx license type and version.

Monitor the cluster status

Use the pxctl status command to display the status of your Portworx cluster:

PX_POD=$(kubectl get pods -l name=portworx -n <px-namespace> -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
kubectl exec $PX_POD -n <px-namespace> -- /opt/pwx/bin/pxctl status