vPSO

There seems to be a lot of confusion around VMware vSphere 7 and Kubernetes on how you can deploy Kubernetes in a lab versus production.

William Lam covers how you can deploy Kubernetes to lab or evaluation. Here: Kubernetes available for evaluation?

VMware vSphere 7 was released April 20th, 2020, and is approaching its 1st milestone of 6 months since GA.  My experience tells me you can count on two things:

1) Update 1 proceeds the GA release of VMware vSphere by about 6 months.

2) Customers tend to wait for Update 1 before they install a new version of vSphere in production.

We are approaching the timeframe where more VMware customers will deploy vSphere 7 and might want to take advantage of using Kubernetes.

Let’s start with vSphere 7 Datasheet for critical information:

A requirement for VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x (VCF 4.x)

Customer Question:

This always prompts the question of why do we need VCF 4.x?

Answer:

K8 deployments require NSX-T VCF 4.x is 1st version of VCF that uses NSX-T in the management and workload domains; by making VCF 4.x a requirement, VMware has validation that a customer has NSX-T deploy in a configuration that will support Kubernetes.

Customer Question:

Ok, I have VCF 4.x deployed, I am excited to deploy Kubernetes for my development team, but I have to ask is there anything else we need to do before we start?

Answer:

Yes, one more thing you need to license your clusters to use Kubernetes Licensing for vSphere with Kubernetes the critical piece of information here is:

Assign a VMware vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus with Add-on for Kubernetes license to all ESXi hosts that you want to use as part of a Supervisor Cluster.

Yes, you need to purchase the add on the license to run Kubernetes in production.

Customer Question:

I bought an Add-on license. Can we now deploy Kubernetes?

Answer:

We should have an Architical session before we deploy where we can make decisions on:

What Workload Domain (WLD) should we use for the supervisor cluster?

We can talk about how vCenter inventory has changed now that you enabled your first WLD.

I will cover these topics during my series of blogs on VCF; stay tuned!