Kubernetes is moving away from maintaining cloud providers in-tree. vSphere has an out-of-tree cloud provider that can be used by installing the vSphere cloud provider and cloud storage plugins.

This page covers how to install the Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) and Cloud Storage Interface (CSI) plugins after bringing up a cluster.

Prerequisites

The Kubernetes version must be 1.19 or higher.

Using the vSphere out-of-tree cloud provider requires Linux nodes and is not supported on Windows.

Installation

  1. On the Clusters page, click on Add Cluster and select the vSphere option or Existing Nodes option.
  2. Under Cluster Options > Cloud Provider select External (Out-of-tree). This sets the cloud provider option on the Kubernetes cluster to which sets your Kubernetes cluster up to be configured with an out-of-tree cloud provider.
  3. Finish creating your cluster.
  1. From the Cluster Explorer view, go to the top left dropdown menu and click Apps & Marketplace.

  2. vSphere CPI initializes all nodes with ProviderID which is needed by the vSphere CSI driver. Check if all nodes are initialized with the ProviderID before installing CSI driver with the following command:

  1. From the Cluster Explorer view, go to the top left dropdown menu and click Apps & Marketplace.
  2. Select the vSphere CSI chart. Fill out the required vCenter details.
  3. Set Enable CSI Migration to false.

Using the CSI driver for provisioning volumes

The CSI chart by default creates a storageClass.

All volumes provisioned using this StorageClass will get provisioned by the CSI driver.