Heterogeneous Kubernetes cluster on top of OVN

Author: Paulo Pires pires@apprenda.com

This document describes, step-by-step, how to provision a Kubernetes cluster comprised of:

• One Linux machine acting as Kubernetes master node and OVN central database.
• One Linux machine acting as Kubernetes worker node.
• One Windows machine acting as Kubernetes worker node.
• One Linux machine acting as gateway node.

Many thanks to the great people that helped achieve this, namely:

• Alin Serdean (Cloudbase Solutions)
• Alin Balutoiu (Cloudbase Solutions)
• Feng Min (Google)
• Peter Hornyack (Google)
• The authors of https://github.com/openvswitch/ovn-kubernetes
• Kubernetes SIG-Windows

Requirements

At the time of this writing, the instructions are meant to be run on Google Compute Engine, but apart from gcloud calls and a few networking details, everything detailed below should work regardless of the adopted cloud-provider.

Having that said, here are the requirements:

• Use Google Cloud Platform (GCP), namely Google Compute Engine (GCE) VMs.
  • gcloud CLI tool
• Linux machines(s) run Ubuntu 16.04 with latest updates.
• Windows machine(s) run Windows Server 2016 with latest updates.
• Administrator access to all VMs, i.e. root in Linux machines.

Cluster deployment

Follow these steps to deploy your cluster:

• Deploy the master node, where the OVS/OVN and Kubernetes master components will run.
• Deploy worker nodes, Linux and Windows, where the Kubernetes workloads will run.
• Deploy a gateway node, needed for pod container access to the Internet and for exposing services to the Internet (through services with NodePort load-balancer type).

Demo application

Heterogeneous Kubernetes cluster demo.

Troubleshooting

Some pending issues:

• Load-Balancer service type is not supported in ovn-kubernetes

(Optional) Build packages

OVS/OVN

As root, run:

apt update
apt install -y build-essential fakeroot dkms \
autoconf automake debhelper dh-autoreconf libssl-dev libtool \
python-all python-twisted-conch python-zopeinterface \
graphviz

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs.git
cd ovs
git checkout branch-2.6

dpkg-checkbuilddeps

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS='nocheck' fakeroot debian/rules binary