Automated Deployment of Hightly Available K3s cluster with MetalLB on VMware Vsphere

What is needed

• 6 virtual machines
  • Management VM (Terraform,Ansible playbooks, and kubectl commands will be run from here)
    • 4 cores
    • 8 GB Ram
    • 80 GB HDD
  • 3 Control-Plane nodes (these will host the internal ETCD HA-cluster as well be the Master nodes for the k3s cluster)
    • 2 cores
    • 4 GB Ram
    • 60 GB HDD
  • 2 Worker nodes (where the containers, pods, services, etc will be hosted)
    • 2 cores
    • 4 GB Ram
    • 60 GB HDD
• Optional

How it works

• Terraform - Deploys the virtual machines and configures their initial setup in vcenter.
• Ansible - Runs playbooks against the configured VMs to install needed packages, and run k3s deploy on first master. Then, joins the other nodes to the k3s cluster
• MetalLB acts as a load balancer to allow for deployed services in kubernetes to use a vip and be HA.
• kubectl and other management done from Management VM for on-going development and deployments