Category: Microservices (Page 1 of 8)

Replicating my vSphere network configuration in Openshift Virtualisation

February 5, 2024 / David / 0 Comments

Red Hat Openshift Virtualisation provides a platform for running and managing Virtual Machines alongside Containers using a consistent API. It also provides a mechanism for migrating VMs from platforms such as vSphere.

As I have both environments, I wanted to deploy an Openshift Virtualisation setup that mimics my current vSphere setup so I could migrate Virtual Machines to it.

Existing vSphere Design

Below is a diagram depicting my current vSphere setup. My ESXi hosts are dual-homed with a separation of management (vmkernel) and virtual machine traffic.

vmnic1 is connected to a trunk port accommodating several different VLANs. These are configured as corresponding port groups in the Distributed Switch.

Integrating an Openshift Virtualisation host

Given an Openshift host with the same number of NICs, we can design a similar solution including a test use case:

By default, an existing bridge (ovs-system) is created by Openshift to facilitate cluster networking. To achieve the same level of isolation configured in the vSphere environment, an additional bridge is required. This will be called vlan-trunk and as the name implies, it will act as a trunk interface for a range of VLAN networks.

Once configured, a Virtual Machine Instance can be created, connected to one of these VLAN networks and reside on the same L2 network as their vSphere-managed VM counterparts.

Configuring the Openshift Node

There are several ways to accomplish this, however for ease, the NMState Operator can be used to configure host networking in a declarative way:

Once installed, a default NMState object needs to be created:

apiVersion: nmstate.io/v1
kind: NMState
metadata:
  name: nmstate
spec: {}

After which we can define an instance of the NodeNetworkConfigurationPolicy object that creates our additional bridge interface and includes a specific NIC.

apiVersion: nmstate.io/v1
kind: NodeNetworkConfigurationPolicy
metadata:
  name: vlan-trunk-ens34-policy
spec:
  desiredState:
    interfaces:
      - name: vlan-trunk
        description: Linux bridge with ens34 as a port
        type: linux-bridge
        state: up
        ipv4:
          enabled: false
        bridge:
          options:
            stp:
              enabled: false
          port:
            - name: ens34

To validate, run ip addr show on the host:

2: ens33: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,ALLMULTI,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master ovs-system state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:50:56:bb:e3:c3 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp2s1
3: ens34: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master vlan-trunk state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:50:56:bb:97:0d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp2s2

...

653: vlan-trunk: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:50:56:bb:97:0d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

In a similar way that Distributed Port groups are created in vSphere, we can create NetworkAttachmentDefinition objects that represent our physical network(s) in software.

The example below is comparable to a Distributed Port Group in vSphere that’s configured to tag traffic with the VLAN ID of 40. If required, we could repeat this process for each VLAN/Distributed Port group so we have a 1:1 mapping between both the vSphere and Openshift Virtualisation environments.

apiVersion: k8s.cni.cncf.io/v1
kind: NetworkAttachmentDefinition
metadata:
  annotations:
    k8s.v1.cni.cncf.io/resourceName: bridge.network.kubevirt.io/vlan-trunk
  name: vm-vlan-40
  namespace: openshift-nmstate
spec:
  config: '{"name":"vm-vlan-40","type":"cnv-bridge","cniVersion":"0.3.1","bridge":"vlan-trunk","vlan":40,"macspoofchk":true,"ipam":{},"preserveDefaultVlan":false}'

Which can be referenced when creating a VM:

After a short period, the VM’s IP address will be reported to the console. In my example, I have a DHCP server running on that VLAN, which is how this VM acquired its IP address:

Which we can test connectivity from another machine with ping. such as a VM running on an ESXi Host:

sh-5.1# ping 172.16.40.4
PING 172.16.40.4 (172.16.40.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.40.4: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=1.42 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.40.4: icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=0.960 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.40.4: icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=0.842 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.40.4: icmp_seq=4 ttl=63 time=0.967 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.40.4: icmp_seq=5 ttl=63 time=0.977 ms

By taking this approach, we can gradually start migrating VM’s from vSphere to Openshift Virtualisation with minimal disruption, which I will cover in a subsequent post.

Changing the default apps wildcard certificate in OCP4

December 30, 2023 / David / 0 Comments

In a standard OCP4 installation, several route objects are created by default and secured with a internally signed wildcard certificate.

These routes are configured as <app-name>.apps.<domain>. In my example, I have a cluster with the assigned domain ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk, which results in the routes below:

oauth-openshift.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk
console-openshift-console.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk
grafana-openshift-monitoring.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk
thanos-querier-openshift-monitoring.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk
prometheus-k8s-openshift-monitoring.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk
alertmanager-main-openshift-monitoring.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk

Inspecting console-openshift-console.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk shows us the default wildcard TLS certificate used by the Ingress Operator:

Because it’s internally signed, it’s not trusted by default by external clients. However, this can be changed.

Installing Cert-Manager

OperatorHub includes the upstream cert-manager chart, as well as one maintained by Red Hat. This can be installed to manage the lifecycle of our new certificate. Navigate to Operators -> Operator Hub -> cert-manager and install.

Create `Secret`, `Issuer` and `Certificate` resources

With Cert-Manager installed, we need to provide configuration so it knows how to issue challenges and generate certificates. In this example:

Secret – A client secret created from my cloud provider for authentication used to satisfy the challenge type. In this example AzureDNS, as I’m using the DNS challenge request type to prove ownership of this domain.
ClusterIssuer – A cluster wide configuration that when referenced, determines how to get (issue) certs. You can have multiple Issuers in a cluster, namespace or cluster scoped pointing to different providers and configurations.
Certificate – TLS certs can be generated automatically from ingress annotations, however in this example, it is used to request and store the certificate in its own lifecycle, not tied to a specific ingress object.

Let’s Encrypt provides wildcard certificates, but only through the DNS-01 challenge. The HTTP-01 challenge cannot be used to issue wildcard certificates. This is reflected in the config:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: azuredns-config
  namespace: cert-manager
type: Opaque
data:
  client-secret: <Base64 Encoded Secret from Azure>
---
apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-production
  namespace: cert-manager
spec:
  acme:
    server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    email: <email>
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: letsencrypt
    solvers:
    - dns01:
        azureDNS:
          clientID: <clientID>
          clientSecretSecretRef:
            name: azuredns-config
            key: client-secret
          subscriptionID: <subscriptionID>
          tenantID: <tenantID>
          resourceGroupName: <resourceGroupName>
          hostedZoneName: virtualthoughts.co.uk
          # Azure Cloud Environment, default to AzurePublicCloud
          environment: AzurePublicCloud
---
apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
  name: wildcard-apps-certificate
  namespace: openshift-ingress
spec:
  secretName: apps-wildcard-tls
  issuerRef:
    name: letsencrypt-production
    kind: ClusterIssuer
  commonName: "*.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk"
  dnsNames:
  - "*.apps.ocp-acm.virtualthoughts.co.uk"

Applying the above will create the respective objects required for us to request, receive and store a wildcard certificate from LetsEncrypt, using the DNS challenge request with AzureDNS.

The certificate may take ~2mins or so to become Ready due to the nature of the DNS style challenge.

oc get cert -A

NAMESPACE           NAME                        READY   SECRET              AGE
openshift-ingress   wildcard-apps-certificate   True    apps-wildcard-tls   33m

Patch the Ingress Operator

With the certificate object created, the Ingress Operator needs re configuring, referencing the secret name of the certificate object for our new certificate:

oc patch ingresscontroller.operator default \
--type=merge -p \
'{"spec":{"defaultCertificate":{"name":"apps-wildcard-tls"}}}' \
--namespace=openshift-ingress-operator

Validate

After applying, navigating back to the clusters console will present the new wildcard cert:

Improving the CI/build process for the community Rancher Exporter

June 5, 2023 / David / 0 Comments

One of my side projects is developing and maintaining an unofficial Prometheus Exporter for Rancher. It exposes metrics pertaining to Rancher-specific resources including, but not limited to managed clusters, Kubernetes versions, and more. Below shows an example dashboard based on these metrics.

Incidentally, if you are using Rancher, I’d love to hear your thoughts/feedback.

Previous CI workflow

The flowchart below outlines the existing process. Whilst automated, pushing directly to latest is bad practice.

To improve this. Several additional steps were added. First of which acquires the latest, versioned image of the exporter and saves it to the $GITHUB_OUTPUT environment

    - name: Retrieve latest Docker image version
        id: get_version
        run: |
          echo "image_version=$(curl -s "https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/virtualthoughts/prometheus-rancher-exporter/tags/" | jq -r '.results[].name' | grep -v latest | sort -V | tail -n 1)" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

Referencing this, the next version can be generated based on MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Incrementing the PATCH version. In the future, this will be modified to add more flexibility to change MAJOR and MINOR versions.

      - name: Increment version
        id: increment_version
        run: |
          # Increment the retrieved version
          echo "updated_version=$(echo "${{ steps.get_version.outputs.image_version }}" | awk -F. -v OFS=. '{$NF++;print}')" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

With the version generated, the subsequent step can tag and push both the incremented version, and latest.

      - name: Build and push
        uses: docker/build-push-action@v3
        with:
          context: .
          push: true
          tags: |
            virtualthoughts/prometheus-rancher-exporter:${{ steps.increment_version.outputs.updated_version }}
            virtualthoughts/prometheus-rancher-exporter:latest

Lastly, the Github action will also modify the YAML manifest file to reference the most recent, versioned image:

      - name: Update Kubernetes YAML manifest
        run: |
          # Install yq
          curl -sL https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest/download/yq_linux_amd64 -o yq
          chmod +x yq
          sudo mv yq /usr/local/bin/
          
          # Find and update the image tag in the YAML file
          IMAGE_NAME="virtualthoughts/prometheus-rancher-exporter"
          NEW_TAG="${{ steps.increment_version.outputs.updated_version }}"
          OLD_TAG=$(yq eval '.spec.template.spec.containers[] | select(.name == "rancher-exporter").image' manifests/exporter.yaml | cut -d":" -f2)
          NEW_IMAGE="${IMAGE_NAME}:${NEW_TAG}"
          sed -i "s|${IMAGE_NAME}:${OLD_TAG}|${NEW_IMAGE}|" manifests/exporter.yaml

Which results in: