Operating the SMI Cluster Manager on vCenter VMware
This section describes how to instantiate the K8s Cluster on the SMI Cluster Manager in a VMware vSphere environment. The SMI Cluster Manager is the de-facto orchestrator for the K8s Cluster. It requires add-ons like Ngnix-Ingress, Istio, and so on. Also, the Ops Center is required for all the Cisco Cloud products using the SMI.
SMI supports datacenters at the root level and within folders. If the datacenter is within a folder, then the entire path from the root until the datacenter is mentioned in the datacenter-path field. If the vSphere cluster is organised within folders, SMI can auto-detect the cluster as long as the name is unique with the datacenter.
The SMI Cluster Manager currently provisions the following:
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Base OS, creation of nodes and virtual machines in VMware vSphere virtualization environment.
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Deployment of K8s multi-control plane cluster with Calico pod networking.
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Deployment of K8s addon applications.
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Application provisioning. You can either deploy the Ops Center alone or the entire product.
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Product based Host OS customization for nodes with specific labels.