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.

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 zeroed thick vmdk on each VM:

export VSPHERE_DISK_TEMPLATE=type=eagerzeroedthick,size=150