Automation Archives - Network Engineer Blog – Giang Pham | CCIEx2 #42780 (SP,DC) | AWS

Using Ansible to automate the deployment of an on-prem HA Kubernetes cluster with Cisco ACI CNI plugin

Posted on September 29, 2020September 29, 2020 by GP

In this post, I will share my experience in setting up an HA Kubernetes cluster. The cluster consists of 3 external etcd nodes, 3 master nodes and 3 worker nodes. The nodes are VMs hosted inside VMWare ESXi (integrated with ACI using VMM domain) on a HyperFlex cluster. However, you can perform the same steps on any standard ESXi deployment with VMM domain integration. In my setup I also use Cisco ACI CNI plugin to provide network connectivities among pods within the Kubernetes cluster. Ansible is used to provide automation to the installation:

spinning up the VMs on ESXi
installing HA etcd cluster
creating an active/standby haproxy as LB for multiple master nodes
configuring a Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm
applying ACI CNI plugin to have a fully working K8S cluster.

[Edit] I put the Ansible playbook code and the Jinja2 template files on my Github repo.

(3/3) A deep-dive into OpenStack networking with Cisco ACI Opflex integration – External connectivity

Posted on July 13, 2020September 7, 2020 by GP

In previous posts of the series, I have covered the installation of the Cisco ACI Opflex plugin our OpenStack lab and covered the basics of the plugin. Specifically, we have gone through the core benefits of the Opflex OVS agent, such as virtualization visibility on ACI, distributed routing, optimized DHCP and Metadata functions, etc.

In this part 3 of the series, I will cover the setup of the external networks to allow OpenStack instances in the created tenants to communicate with the outside world through ACI.

Tutorial: How to install ACI integration with OpenStack

Posted on March 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by GP

Motivation

One of the main features that I’ve always been impressed with ACI is its capabilities to integrate with popular virtualization domains- VMWare, OpenStack, Microsoft SCVMM, Kubernetes, etc. There have been quite a lot of resources covering ACI integration with VMWare in great details. You can find the lab guide in any Cisco DC specialization courses such as DCVAI / DCAC9K, and many other sources you can google for yourself. However, there are not as many for OpenStack. This tutorial is based on Cisco’s official installation guide, adapted to a newer OpenStack release (Queens) on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic. I hope it will be helpful for those who are seeking a quick and easy way to setup an OpenStack environment with ACI integration. In the future posts, I may write about some key benefits, features, and mechanisms of this ACI-OpenStack integration.

Tutorial: Provision and consume bare metals with MAAS and Juju – Part 2

Posted on February 10, 2020February 25, 2020 by GP

This post is second part of a series on MAAS/Juju and their usage in my lab. In this part I will cover the MAAS machine enlisting and commissioning process and workaround/fixes for some of the caveats you might encounter.

Let’s revisit the lab setup topology below and describe the process.

Tutorial: Provision and consume bare metals with MAAS and Juju – Part 1

Posted on January 31, 2020February 10, 2020 by GP

In this multi-part tutorial series, I will demonstrate how MAAS and Juju have helped me quickly setup and consume both bare metal servers and virtual machines in our lab in an automated, cloud-like fashion.

The first part will cover the high level introduction to MAAS and Juju, my MAAS installation, and MAAS network service configuration.

Part 2 is here.