Now that we know what the networking looks like, let’s go ahead and check on what components we need to deploy it.

And because I am restricted in my own lab environment, I went with a single flat network as follows: While this makes the integration with NSX-T really useful, I wanted just look at the steps involved without having NSX-T in the mix. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the BOSH agents on the K8s nodes need to reach back to the BOSH director to pull down appropriate packages, as well as reach back to the vSphere environment to request the creation of persistent disks for the master and workers. These are used to get the correct privileges to roll out the Kubernetes cluster(s). Once these are deployed, a PKS client VM is set up which contains the UAA (user account and authorization) and PKS command line extensions. This is responsible for deploying the BOSH Director component and then the Pivotal Container Service (PKS). This needs to be able to communicate with your vSphere environment. To get started, the Pivotal Ops Manager is deployed. I put together this diagram to assist with understanding the network dependencies.

Let’s begin by having a quick look at the various components and how they are connected. If you want to learn more about what PKS is about, have a read of this blog post where I discuss the PKS announcement from VMworld 2017. Note that this is going to be quite a long post as there are a lot of pieces to deploy to get to the point where a K8s cluster can be rolled out. I will be referencing William’s blogs from time to time as they contain some very useful snippets of information. He highlights all of the steps needed to get PKS deployed with NSX-T. If you are looking for a more complex network deployment, have a read of the excellent series of posts that my good pal William Lam put together. What it will show you are the various moving parts that need to be considered when deploying your own PKS. Again, like some of my previous posts, this is more of a learning exercise than a best practice. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple different networks, I have deployed everything on a single flat network. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post.

These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. PKS has a number of network dependencies. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab.

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