Quick Setup Guide For PMK

This document provides a quick setup guide for Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK). If you are new to PMK, we recommend starting with PMK Overview and PMK SaaS Managed Architecture first.

PMK supports creating Kubernetes clusters with on-premises infrastructure or public cloud providers. You can create and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across any of these environments.

Supported Kubernetes Cluster Infrastructure

Platform9 is able to run Kubernetes across a variety on infrastructure including:

Edge - BareOS
Data Centers - BareOS
AWS - Native Cloud Provider
Azure - Native Cloud Provider
Google Cloud - BareOS

All of the supported infrastructure share common system requirements and can co-exist within a single Platform9 SaaS Management Plane.

Supported Operating Systems

Regardless of what infrastructure or cloud provider you are creating your PMK clusters on, PMK supports the following operating systems for the nodes of those Kubernetes clusters.

CentOS 7+ (64-bit)
RHEL 7+ (64-bit)
Ubuntu LTS 16.04 (64-bit)
Ubuntu LTS 18.04 (64-bit)

BareOS is a Kubernetes Cluster running on a bare bones OS, BareOS for short, with support for VMs running anywhere including all public clouds and physical servers. Read What is BareOS for more information.

BareOS System Requirements

These requirements ensure that your Kubernetes cluster nodes are provided with enough resources to run core Kubernetes services, monitoring and other required services that PMK deploys, and your containerized applications that will run on top of Kubernetes.

Test / Proof of Concept (PoC) Clusters

To create a simple test Kubernetes cluster, each node that is to be part of the cluster should have:

CPU

Minimum: 4 v/CPUs

RAM

Minimum: 16 GB of RAM

Storage

Minimum Size: 30 GB
Free Space: 20 GB

Production Clusters

To run a production grade Kubernetes cluster, each node that is to be part of the cluster should have:

CPU

1 CPU Core per 4 GB of RAM.

RAM

Minimum of 16 GB of RAM

Storage

Minimum Size: 60GB
At least 40 GB of free disk space.
20 GB of disk space will be used by the Operating System and Kubernetes components.

CentOS

At least 8GB of unallocated storage in the filesystem.

The /var/lib directory should exist on a file system with at least 30 GB of free disk space

Networking

At least one physical (or VLAN backed) NIC with an IP address.

This type of configuration should be used to create a production cluster that you will use either for CI/CD or to run production applications.

A production cluster should be created with at least 3 master nodes.
Best practice is to not run your workloads on the masters in a production cluster, but to have separate worker nodes in the cluster with sufficient capacity to run your workloads

BareOS Quick Start

Follow these steps to create a simple test BareOS Kubernetes cluster:

Step 1 - Get a VM or physical server running Ubuntu or CentOS. See Deploy Kubernetes on MacOS.

For a single node test cluster, you need a VM with:

Minimum 30GB HDD
Minimum of 16 GB of RAM
Minimum 4 v/CPUs

Step 2 - Install Platform9 CLI.

Bash
    
 
bash <(curl -sL http://pf9.io/get_cli)
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This will download a script named cli_setup.sh and invoke the script.

This process will ask for the following:

Your PMK deployment URL
Your PMK account username and password

Step 3 - On board the node to Platform9 using Prep-Node.

Bash
    
 
sudo pf9ctl cluster prep-node
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Step 4 - Navigate to the PMK Web App and build a cluster using BareOS with Workloads on Masters Enabled.

BareOS in Production

Follow these requirements and guidelines to create production grade BareOS Kubernetes clusters:

AWS Cluster Setup

PMK provides native integration with Amazon AWS to create Kubernetes clusters using AWS EC2 instances.

In this model, PMK manages the lifecycle of the nodes on EC2, Route53, ELB, EBS to create a fully production-ready Kubernetes cluster that can auto-scale based on workload requirements.

Step 1 System requirements
Step 2 AWS Prerequisites
Step 2 Networking configuration is completed during the deployment of PMK clusters, so you do not need to follow any special networking pre-requisites
Step 3 Add AWS Cloud Provider
Step 4 Deploy AWS Cluster

Azure Cluster Setup

PMK also provides native integration with Microsoft Azure to create Kubernetes clusters using Azure VM instances.

In this model, PMK manages the lifecycle of the Azure VMs, Traffic manager, Application gateway and Azure managed disks to create a fully production-ready Kubernetes cluster that can auto-scale based on workload requirements.

Step 1 Azure Prerequisites
Step 2 Networking configuration is completed during the deployment of PMK clusters, so you do not need to follow any special networking pre-requisites
Step 3 Add Microsoft Azure Cloud Provider
Step 4 Create Cluster on Azure

Troubleshooting

Last updated on Mar 29, 2021

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