To use VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension 4.0 and later, ensure you are satisfying the following prerequisites and follow the best practices.

Tenant Administrator Requirements

  • Ensure your OVDCs have routed networks. This allow the OVDCs to host clusters.
  • Ensure you use static IP ranges for the VMs. Do not use dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP).
  • Ensure the DNS configuration is correctly configured on an OVDC network.
  • Ensure the source network address translation (SNAT) rule is set on the gateway to ensure outbound traffic for the organization network classless inter-domain routing (CIDR).
  • Ensure firewall rules do not prevent access to VMware Cloud Director endpoint, Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, and DNS server IPs.
  • Ensure you are not using the 172.17.0.0/16 and 172.18.0.0/16 CIDR ranges or IP addresses from these ranges in the following network assets. These CIDR ranges are reserved by Docker and are used during the creation of bootstrap clusters.
    • Organization VDC network ranges where your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters are deployed.
    • External IP allocations and ranges that are used by the Orgаnization Edge Gateway and the associated Load Balancer.
    • Infrastructure networks where your DNS servers are connected.
    • The IP address, which the VMware Cloud Director public API endpoint URL resolves to.

Tenant Administrator Best Practices

  • Before letting tenant users begin cluster creation, create a test virtual service on the tenant gateway to test the VMware NSX® and VMware NSX® Advanced Load Balancer™ configuration.
  • Do not use NSX direct organization networks for cluster creations. This is an unsupported configuration and NSX Advanced Load Balancer does not work with direct networks. As a result, you cannot create clusters with load balancers.
  • To have nodes with a disk size different than 20GB, which is the default disk size defined in the template OVAs, deactivate fast provisioning in organization virtual data center (OVDC).

Tenant User Best Practices

  • If you attempt to create clusters for the first time or if you are learning how to use VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension, deactivate Autorepair on Errors in the cluster creation workflow. This helps you to troubleshoot and properly capture the logs from the bootstrap VM.
  • Certain actions that you perform, such as resizing a cluster, may not appear in the Nodepools tab in the Kubernetes Container Clusters UI plug-in immediately. However, you can view the latest status in the the Events tab in the Cluster Information page.
  • When you delete and force delete clusters in the Kubernetes Container Clusters UI plug-in, there may be a delay in the actions taking effect. However, you can view the latest status in the Events tab on the Cluster Information page.