vSphere Cluster Creation Customization Choices

Below are a some methods to customize your cluster during creation. If none of these choices apply, skip this page and proceed to either section:

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When creating clusters, many options are available such as those listed in this section of the documentation. Familiarize yourself with the flags required to apply these customizations during cluster creation.

vSphere Customizing CAPI Clusters — Familiarize yourself with Cluster API before editing the cluster objects because edits can prevent the cluster from deploying successfully.

vSphere Registry Mirrors — Configure your cluster to use an existing local registry when attempting to pull images by adding the flag(s) to the dkp create cluster command to pull images from your local registry.

vSphere Load the Registry — Because air-gapped environments do not have direct access to the Internet, you must download, extract and load several required images to your local container registry, before installing DKP. If desired, environments that are non-air-gapped can also perform the follow steps to use a local registry for speed and security reasons.

vSphere HTTP Proxy — When creating a DKP cluster in environments that use an HTTP/HTTPS proxy, you must provide proxy details. The proxy values are strings that list a set of proxy servers, URLs, or wildcard addresses that is specific to your environment.

vSphere Provision on the Flatcar Linux OS — When provisioning onto the Flatcar Container Linux distribution, you must instruct the bootstrap cluster to make some changes related to the installation paths. To accomplish this, add the --os-hint flatcar flag to the dkp create cluster command.

Configure MetalLB for a vSphere infrastructure — It is recommended that an external load balancer(LB) be the control plane endpoint. To distribute request load among the control plane machines, configure the load balancer to send requests to all the control plane machines. Configure the load balancer to send requests only to control plane machines that are responding to API requests. If you do not have one, you can use Metal LB to create a MetalLB configmap for your vSphere infrastructure.

vSphere Output Directory YAML — You can create individual files with different smaller manifests for ease in editing using the --output-directory flag used with --output=json|yaml. You create the directory of where to output resources to files.

Next Step

After you make decisions about customization choices, proceed to either the non-air-gapped or air-gapped environment instructions:

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