Quickstart Guide

This guide describes how to set up a MetalK8s cluster. It offers general requirements and describes sizing, configuration, and deployment. With respect to installation procedures, the only significant difference between a test cluster and a full production environment is the amount of resources required to implement the design.

General Cluster Requirements

Setting up a MetalK8s cluster quickly requires at least three machines running CentOS 7.4 or higher (these can be VMs) to which you have SSH access. Each machine acting as a Kubernetes node (all three in the present example) must also have at least one disk available to provision storage volumes.

Sizing

Each node must satisfy the following sizing requirements.

Note

The root file system requires at least 20 GB.

Component etcd Master Node
Cores 2 4 4
RAM 4 GB 8 GB 8 GB
Minimum dedicated storage capacity required
128 GB

Proxies

For nodes operating behind a proxy, add the following lines to each cluster server’s /etc/environment file:

http_proxy=http://user;pass@<HTTP proxy IP address>:<port>
https_proxy=http://user;pass@<HTTPS proxy IP address>:<port>
no_proxy=localhost,127.0.0.1,10.*

Download the MetalK8s Source

Go to the MetalK8s releases page and download the source code zip file for the release you wish to install. When the download is complete, unpack the zipped file.

Define an Inventory

Each server must be configured in an inventory that identifies the servers to the Ansible-based deployment system, as well as their basic configuration, including masters and nodes.

The inventory is a directory that contains a hosts file, which lists all hosts in the cluster, and a subdirectory (group_vars) that contains kube-node.yml, a configuration file.

To create an inventory:

  1. Log in to the machine to which you downloaded the MetalK8s project.

  2. Create a directory (for example, inventory/quickstart-cluster) in which the inventory will be stored. Change to that directory.

    $ cd metalk8s
    $ mkdir -p inventory/quickstart-cluster
    $ cd inventory/quickstart-cluster/
    
  3. Create the hosts file, which lists all hosts.

    node-01 ansible_host=10.0.0.1 ansible_user=centos
    node-02 ansible_host=10.0.0.2 ansible_user=centos
    node-03 ansible_host=10.0.0.3 ansible_user=centos
    
    [kube-master]
    node-01
    node-02
    node-03
    
    [etcd]
    node-01
    node-02
    node-03
    
    [kube-node]
    node-01
    node-02
    node-03
    
    [k8s-cluster:children]
    kube-node
    kube-master
    

    Change the host names, IP addresses, and user names to conform to your infrastructure. For example, if your servers are named “server1”, “server2”, and “server3”, copy the code block above and replace ALL instances of “node-0” with “server”.

Warning

Using the remote root user to deploy MetalK8s is not supported, see Can I use the ‘root’ user to deploy MetalK8s to servers?.

  1. Create a group_vars subdirectory in the directory you created in step 2 (the one that contains the hosts file) and change to it.

    $ mkdir group_vars ; cd group_vars
    
  2. In the group_vars subdirectory, create a kube-node.yml file. This file declares how to set up hosts in the kube-node group; that is, hosts on which pods shall be scheduled:

    metalk8s_lvm_drives_vg_metalk8s: ['/dev/vdb']
    

    This example assumes every kube-node host has a disk available as /dev/vdb that can be used to set up Kubernetes PersistentVolumes. For more information, see Storage Architecture.

Enter the MetalK8s Virtual Environment Shell

To install a supported version of Ansible and its dependencies, along with some Kubernetes tools (kubectl and helm), MetalK8s provides a make target that installs these in a local environment. To enter this environment, run make shell (this takes a few seconds when first run):

$ make shell
Creating virtualenv...
Installing Python dependencies...
Downloading kubectl...
Downloading Helm...
Launching MetalK8s shell environment. Run 'exit' to quit.
(metalk8s) $

Deploy the Cluster

Run the following command to deploy the cluster:

(metalk8s) $ ansible-playbook -i inventory/quickstart-cluster/hosts -b playbooks/deploy.yml

For a simple test deployment such as the present three-node cluster, this takes about a half hour. Actual deployment time will vary based on the size of the cluster and hardware and network performance.

Inspect the Cluster

Deployment creates a file containing credentials to access the cluster (inventory/quickstart-cluster/artifacts/admin.conf). Remaining in the virtual environment shell, export this location to give kubectl and helm the correct credentials to contact the cluster’s kube-master nodes:

(metalk8s) $ export KUBECONFIG=`pwd`/inventory/quickstart-cluster/artifacts/admin.conf

If your system can reach port 6443 on the master node referred to in admin.conf, you can

  • List all nodes:

    (metalk8s) $ kubectl get nodes
    NAME        STATUS    ROLES            AGE       VERSION
    node-01     Ready     master,node      1m        v1.9.5+coreos.0
    node-02     Ready     master,node      1m        v1.9.5+coreos.0
    node-03     Ready     master,node      1m        v1.9.5+coreos.0
    
  • List all pods:

    (metalk8s) $ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
    NAMESPACE     NAME                                                 READY  STATUS    RESTARTS  AGE
    kube-ingress  nginx-ingress-controller-9d8jh                       1/1    Running   0         1m
    kube-ingress  nginx-ingress-controller-d7vvg                       1/1    Running   0         1m
    kube-ingress  nginx-ingress-controller-m8jpq                       1/1    Running   0         1m
    kube-ingress  nginx-ingress-default-backend-6664bc64c9-xsws5       1/1    Running   0         1m
    kube-ops      alertmanager-kube-prometheus-0                       2/2    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      alertmanager-kube-prometheus-1                       2/2    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      es-client-7cf569f5d8-2z974                           1/1    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      es-client-7cf569f5d8-qq4h2                           1/1    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      es-data-cd5446fff-pkmhn                              1/1    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      es-data-cd5446fff-zzd2h                              1/1    Running   0         2m
    kube-ops      es-exporter-elasticsearch-exporter-7df5bcf58b-k9fdd  1/1    Running   3         1m
    ...
    
  • List all deployed Helm applications:

    (metalk8s) $ helm list
    NAME                    REVISION        UPDATED                         STATUS          CHART                           NAMESPACE
    es-exporter             3               Wed Apr 25 23:10:13 2018        DEPLOYED        elasticsearch-exporter-0.1.2    kube-ops
    fluentd                 3               Wed Apr 25 23:09:59 2018        DEPLOYED        fluentd-elasticsearch-0.1.4     kube-ops
    heapster                3               Wed Apr 25 23:09:37 2018        DEPLOYED        heapster-0.2.7                  kube-system
    kibana                  3               Wed Apr 25 23:10:06 2018        DEPLOYED        kibana-0.2.2                    kube-ops
    kube-prometheus         3               Wed Apr 25 23:09:22 2018        DEPLOYED        kube-prometheus-0.0.33          kube-ops
    nginx-ingress           3               Wed Apr 25 23:09:09 2018        DEPLOYED        nginx-ingress-0.11.1            kube-ingress
    prometheus-operator     3               Wed Apr 25 23:09:14 2018        DEPLOYED        prometheus-operator-0.0.15      kube-ops
    

Cluster Services

Services to operate and monitor your MetalK8s cluster are provided. To access these dashboards:

  1. If you are accessing the cluster using a machine from which you didn’t install MetalK8s, copy the credentials in admin.conf and export its path (see Inspect the Cluster).

  2. Open port 6443 on your cluster’s master nodes for remote access to cluster services.

  3. Inside a make shell environment, run kubectl proxy from your local machine. This opens a tunnel to the Kubernetes cluster, which makes the following tools available:

    Service Role Link
    Kubernetes dashboard A general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/
    Grafana Monitoring dashboards for cluster services http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/kube-prometheus-grafana:http/proxy/
    Cerebro An administration and monitoring console for Elasticsearch clusters http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/cerebro:http/proxy/
    Kibana A search console for logs indexed in Elasticsearch http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/http:kibana:/proxy/

See Cluster Services for more information about these services and their configuration.

If you want to configure the deployment of those services give a look at Configuring services deployment