The VCenter Operator automatically configures and deploys cinder and nova-compute nodes corresponding to the discovered vcenters and clusters. It follows the convention over configuration principle to keep the configuration to a minimum. It relies heavily on a other configmaps being deployed by openstack-helm and should be best deployed with it.

Some basic configuration is however necessary. The VCenter Operator has to be deployed in a way that it allows it to deploy and modify resources within the configured target namespace. The following values are required to be stored in a configmap named vcenter-operator in the same namespace as the running pod, and expects the following values:

namespace

The namespace to deploy into

username

The username to use to log on the vcenter

password

A password used as a seed for the master-password algorithm <https://masterpassword.app/masterpassword-algorithm.pdf> to generate long-form passwords specific for each vcenter discovered.

cinder_agent_image

A docker image for a vcenter cinder volume

cinder_sentry_dsn

Optionally, a Sentry DSN for the process

neutron_agent_image

A docker image for the networking side of the compute node (currently only Networking DVS Driver)

nova_agent_image

A docker image for the nova compute process.

cinder_sentry_dsn/neutron_sentry_dsn/nova_sentry_dsn

Optionally, Sentry DSN, which will exported as environment variables

The vcenter operator relies on the following conventions:

• The operator relies on having dns as a kubernetes service with the labels component=mdns,type=backend, and polls the DNS behind it.
• It polls the last search domain of the resolv.conf.
• Within that domain, the vcenter is expected to match vc-[a-z]+-[0-9]+.
• The operator expects to be able to log on with username and the long form password derived by the given user and password for the fully-qualified domain name of the vcenter.
• Within the VCenter, the name of the VSphere datacenter will be used as the availability-zone name (in lower-case) for each entity child.
• Within a Datacenter, clusters prefixed with production will be used as compute nodes. The name of the compute-host will be the nova-compute-<suffix>, where suffix is whatever stands after production in the cluster-name.
• Within that cluster, the nova storage will be derived by looking for mounted storage prefixed by eph. The longest common prefix will be used as a search pattern for the storage of the compute node.
• The first Port-group within that cluster prefixed with br- will be used for the vm networking, and the suffix determines the physical name of the network.
• A cluster prefixed with storage will cause the creation of a cinder nodes with the name cinder-volume-vmware-<suffix>. This is only provisional and should be replaced by one per datacenter.