Create vSphere cluster

Create an EKS Anywhere cluster on VMware vSphere

EKS Anywhere supports a VMware vSphere provider for EKS Anywhere deployments. This document walks you through setting up EKS Anywhere on vSphere in a way that:

Deploys an initial cluster on your vSphere environment. That cluster can be used as a self-managed cluster (to run workloads) or a management cluster (to create and manage other clusters)
Deploys zero or more workload clusters from the management cluster

If your initial cluster is a management cluster, it is intended to stay in place so you can use it later to modify, upgrade, and delete workload clusters. Using a management cluster makes it faster to provision and delete workload clusters. Also it lets you keep vSphere credentials for a set of clusters in one place: on the management cluster. The alternative is to simply use your initial cluster to run workloads. See Cluster topologies for details.

Important

Creating an EKS Anywhere management cluster is the recommended model. Separating management features into a separate, persistent management cluster provides a cleaner model for managing the lifecycle of workload clusters (to create, upgrade, and delete clusters), while workload clusters run user applications. This approach also reduces provider permissions for workload clusters.

Note: Before you create your cluster, you have the option of validating the EKS Anywhere bundle manifest container images by following instructions in the Verify Cluster Images page.

Prerequisite Checklist

EKS Anywhere needs to:

Be run on an Admin machine that has certain machine requirements .
Have certain resources from your VMware vSphere deployment available.
Have some preparation done before creating an EKS Anywhere cluster.

Also, see the Ports and protocols page for information on ports that need to be accessible from control plane, worker, and Admin machines.

Steps

The following steps are divided into two sections:

Create an initial cluster (used as a management or self-managed cluster)
Create zero or more workload clusters from the management cluster

Create an initial cluster

Follow these steps to create an EKS Anywhere cluster that can be used either as a management cluster or as a self-managed cluster (for running workloads itself).

Optional Configuration

Set License Environment Variable

Add a license to any cluster for which you want to receive paid support. If you are creating a licensed cluster, set and export the license variable (see License cluster if you are licensing an existing cluster):
```
export EKSA_LICENSE='my-license-here'
```
After you have created your eksa-mgmt-cluster.yaml and set your credential environment variables, you will be ready to create the cluster.

Configure Curated Packages

The Amazon EKS Anywhere Curated Packages are only available to customers with the Amazon EKS Anywhere Enterprise Subscription. To request a free trial, talk to your Amazon representative or connect with one here . Cluster creation will succeed if authentication is not set up, but some warnings may be genered. Detailed package configurations can be found here .

If you are going to use packages, set up authentication. These credentials should have limited capabilities :
```
export EKSA_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your*access*id"
export EKSA_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your*secret*key"
export EKSA_AWS_REGION="us-west-2"  
```

Generate an initial cluster config (named mgmt for this example):

CLUSTER_NAME=mgmt
eksctl anywhere generate clusterconfig $CLUSTER_NAME \
   --provider vsphere > eksa-mgmt-cluster.yaml

Modify the initial cluster config (eksa-mgmt-cluster.yaml) as follows:
- Refer to vsphere configuration for information on configuring this cluster config for a vSphere provider.
- Add Optional configuration settings as needed. See Github provider to see how to identify your Git information.
- Create at least two control plane nodes, three worker nodes, and three etcd nodes, to provide high availability and rolling upgrades.
Set Credential Environment Variables

Before you create the initial cluster, you will need to set and export these environment variables for your vSphere user name and password. Make sure you use single quotes around the values so that your shell does not interpret the values:
```
export EKSA_VSPHERE_USERNAME='billy'
export EKSA_VSPHERE_PASSWORD='t0p$ecret'
```
Note
If you have a username in the form of domain_name/user_name, you must specify it as user_name@domain_name to avoid errors in cluster creation. For example, vsphere.local/admin should be specified as admin@vsphere.local.

Create cluster

For a regular cluster create (with internet access), type the following:

eksctl anywhere create cluster \
   -f eksa-mgmt-cluster.yaml \
   # --install-packages packages.yaml \ # uncomment to install curated packages at cluster creation

For an airgapped cluster create, follow Preparation for airgapped deployments instructions, then type the following:

eksctl anywhere create cluster \
   -f eksa-mgmt-cluster.yaml \
   --bundles-override ./eks-anywhere-downloads/bundle-release.yaml \
   # --install-packages packages.yaml \ # uncomment to install curated packages at cluster creation

Once the cluster is created you can use it with the generated KUBECONFIG file in your local directory:
```
export KUBECONFIG=${PWD}/${CLUSTER_NAME}/${CLUSTER_NAME}-eks-a-cluster.kubeconfig
```

Check the cluster nodes:

To check that the cluster completed, list the machines to see the control plane, etcd, and worker nodes:

kubectl get machines -A

Example command output

NAMESPACE   NAME                PROVIDERID        PHASE    VERSION
eksa-system mgmt-b2xyz          vsphere:/xxxxx    Running  v1.24.2-eks-1-24-5
eksa-system mgmt-etcd-r9b42     vsphere:/xxxxx    Running  
eksa-system mgmt-md-8-6xr-rnr   vsphere:/xxxxx    Running  v1.24.2-eks-1-24-5
...

The etcd machine doesn’t show the Kubernetes version because it doesn’t run the kubelet service.

Check the initial cluster’s CRD:

To ensure you are looking at the initial cluster, list the CRD to see that the name of its management cluster is itself:
```
kubectl get clusters mgmt -o yaml
```
Example command output
```
...
kubernetesVersion: "1.31"
managementCluster:
  name: mgmt
workerNodeGroupConfigurations:
...
```
Note
The initial cluster is now ready to deploy workload clusters. However, if you just want to use it to run workloads, you can deploy pod workloads directly on the initial cluster without deploying a separate workload cluster and skip the section on running separate workload clusters. To make sure the cluster is ready to run workloads, run the test application in the Deploy test workload section.

Create separate workload clusters

Follow these steps if you want to use your initial cluster to create and manage separate workload clusters.

Set License Environment Variable (Optional)

Add a license to any cluster for which you want to receive paid support. If you are creating a licensed cluster, set and export the license variable (see License cluster if you are licensing an existing cluster):
```
export EKSA_LICENSE='my-license-here'
```
Generate a workload cluster config:
```
CLUSTER_NAME=w01
eksctl anywhere generate clusterconfig $CLUSTER_NAME \
   --provider vsphere > eksa-w01-cluster.yaml
```
Refer to the initial config described earlier for the required and optional settings.

NOTE: Ensure workload cluster object names (Cluster, vSphereDatacenterConfig, vSphereMachineConfig, etc.) are distinct from management cluster object names.
Be sure to set the managementCluster field to identify the name of the management cluster.

For example, the management cluster, mgmt is defined for our workload cluster w01 as follows:
```
apiVersion: anywhere.eks.amazonaws.com/v1alpha1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: w01
spec:
  managementCluster:
    name: mgmt
```
Create a workload cluster in one of the following ways:
- GitOps: See Manage separate workload clusters with GitOps
- Terraform: See Manage separate workload clusters with Terraform
  
  NOTE: spec.users[0].sshAuthorizedKeys must be specified to SSH into your nodes when provisioning a cluster through GitOps or Terraform, as the EKS Anywhere Cluster Controller will not generate the keys like eksctl CLI does when the field is empty.
- eksctl CLI: To create a workload cluster with eksctl, run:
```
eksctl anywhere create cluster \
    -f eksa-w01-cluster.yaml  \
    --kubeconfig mgmt/mgmt-eks-a-cluster.kubeconfig \
    # --install-packages packages.yaml \ # uncomment to install curated packages at cluster creation      
```
  As noted earlier, adding the --kubeconfig option tells eksctl to use the management cluster identified by that kubeconfig file to create a different workload cluster.
- kubectl CLI: The cluster lifecycle feature lets you use kubectl, or other tools that that can talk to the Kubernetes API, to create a workload cluster. To use kubectl, run:
```
kubectl apply -f eksa-w01-cluster.yaml 
```
  To check the state of a cluster managed with the cluster lifecyle feature, use kubectl to show the cluster object with its status.
  
  The status field on the cluster object field holds information about the current state of the cluster.
```
kubectl get clusters w01 -o yaml
```
  The cluster has been fully upgraded once the status of the Ready condition is marked True. See the cluster status guide for more information.

To check the workload cluster, get the workload cluster credentials and run a test workload:

If your workload cluster was created with eksctl, change your credentials to point to the new workload cluster (for example, w01), then run the test application with:

export CLUSTER_NAME=w01
export KUBECONFIG=${PWD}/${CLUSTER_NAME}/${CLUSTER_NAME}-eks-a-cluster.kubeconfig
kubectl apply -f "https://anywhere.eks.amazonaws.com/manifests/hello-eks-a.yaml"

If your workload cluster was created with GitOps or Terraform, the kubeconfig for your new cluster is stored as a secret on the management cluster. You can get credentials and run the test application as follows:

kubectl get secret -n eksa-system w01-kubeconfig -o jsonpath='{.data.value}' | base64 —decode > w01.kubeconfig
export KUBECONFIG=w01.kubeconfig
kubectl apply -f "https://anywhere.eks.amazonaws.com/manifests/hello-eks-a.yaml"

Add more workload clusters:

To add more workload clusters, go through the same steps for creating the initial workload, copying the config file to a new name (such as eksa-w02-cluster.yaml), modifying resource names, and running the create cluster command again.

Next steps

See the Cluster management section for more information on common operational tasks like scaling and deleting the cluster.
See the Package management section for more information on post-creation curated packages installation.