vSphere Cloud Provider

Configure a vSphere Cloud Provider in your IBM® Cloud Private cluster.

Overview

VMware vSphere has a proven Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform that integrates with block, file, and hyperConverged offerings such as VMware virtual storage area network (vSAN). These storage offerings can be exposed as Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), Network File System (NFS), Virtual Volumes (VVol), and vSAN datastores. A datastore is an abstraction that hides storage details and provides an uniform interface for storing persistent data. Depending on the backend storage used, the datastores can be of the type vSAN, VMFS, NFS, and VVol.

vSAN is a hyper-converged infrastructure storage that provides excellent performance as well as reliability. vSAN advantage is simplified storage management with features like policy-driven administration.
VMFS is a cluster file system that allows virtualization to scale beyond a single node for multiple VMware ESX servers.
NFS is a distributed file protocol that is used to access storage over a network, just like local storage. vSphere supports NFS as a backend to store virtual machines files.

For more information, see vSphere Cloud Provider Opens in a new tab .

With Kubernetes cloud provider interface, you can integrate and offer vSphere storage to application workload pods.

Prerequisites and Limitations

See Prerequisites and limitations.

Configuring vSphere Cloud Provider

If you choose vSphere as the cloud infrastructure for your IBM Cloud Private cluster, you can configure vSphere Cloud Provider in your cluster to offer persistent volume to application workload.

To configure vSphere Cloud Provider during IBM Cloud Private installation, see Configuring a vSphere Cloud Provider during IBM Cloud Private installation.
To configure vSphere Cloud Provider after IBM Cloud Private installation, see Configuring a vSphere Cloud Provider after IBM Cloud Private installation.
Note: If you want to configure a vSphere Cloud Provider after you install your IBM® Cloud Private cluster, ensure that you set kubelet_nodename: hostname in the <installation_directory>/cluster/config.yaml file during IBM® Cloud Private installation.

Creating a storage class

To dynamically provision a persistent volume, you need to create a storage class with vsphere-volume as the provisioner. If you have different kind of datastores and you want to provision volume from any of those datastores, you need to create a separate storage class for each of the datastore type.

For more information about creating a storage class for vSphere, see Creating a storage class for vSphere volume.

Verifying the setup

You can verify that the setup is correct by deploying an application that requires persistent storage. Deploy the application from your IBM Cloud Private cluster catalog. For example, deploy the ibm-postgres-dev application. See PostgreSQL Opens in a new tab .

Managing your cluster

Manage vSphere-related operations after your cluster is installed. For more information, see Managing your cluster.