TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2 BUSINESS PROBLEM AND BUSINESS VALUE
3 REQUIREMENTS
3 ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW

WHITE PAPER

SUPERMICRO-SUSE KUBERNETES
SOLUTION USING THE SUSE CAAS
PLATFORM

6 DEPLOYMENT
14 SUMMARYEXECUTIVE SUMMARY

14 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
14 RESOURCES

This white paper is intended to help an organization deploy an on-premises SUSE CaaS Platform
cluster on Supermicro’s BigTwin™, Ultra and SuperStorage systems with the 2nd Generation Intel®
Xeon® Scalable processor to support the latest, Kubernetes compatible workloads

DESCRIPTION
As with all enterprise class IT infrastructures appropriate networking, computing and storage
resources must be planned, purchased, and integrated. This document serves as a reference forthe implementation of a SUSE CaaS Platform cluster for Proof of Concept (PoC) and/or non-mission
critical production workloads on Supermicro SuperStorage ,Ultra,BigTwin servers and Supermicro’s
10G/25G SFP + ethernet switches. Furthermore, the design and implementation suggestions offered
here can be used as the starting point to design and deploy an Enterprise class, mission critical SUSE
CaaS Platform cluster. While SUSE CaaS Platforms can be deployed as virtual Machines, this document
focuses on bare-metal clusters for maximum performance potential. Where possible, resources
required for a mission critical cluster are detailed.
The Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution SUSE CaaS Platform integrates the high density computeand storage platforms to achieve the best performance and scalability. It takes advantage of Intel
Xeon Scalable processors, high-performance NVMe, and 25G networking. The scale-out architecturelets users dynamically expand capacity across cloud environments to meet demand peaks without
downtime or complex processes.
The deployment process for this cluster was implemented, tested and validated in a Supermicro lab.
Super Micro Computer, Inc.
980 Rock Avenue
San Jose, CA 95131 USA
www.supermicro.com- March 2020

TARGET AUDIENCE
The target audience for this document is IT professionals who design, implement, and administer
Kubernetes based infrastructures. It is suggested that this document is reviewed in its entirety, alongwith the referenced supplemental documentation, before beginning any deployment.

BUSINESS PROBLEM AND BUSINESS VALUE
In the rapidly evolving era of DevOps, containerized workloads are becoming increasingly important.
Developers need an API-centric platform to continuously update and integrate critical applications.
Operational teams must implement and manage complex, software-defined infrastructure as
quickly and easily as possible. Investing in an easy-to-deploy and scalable SUSE CaaS Platform allows
organizations to migrate their legacy business applications as well as deploy new, cloud-native
solutions onto a low-friction container-based platform.

BUSINESS PROBLEM
Supporting critical containerized workloads requires a robust container run time engine and cluster
orchestrator. While there are many Kubernetes offerings that provide these features on the market,
savvy business leaders realize that only a few possess the rare combination having of a reasonable
cost of acquisition, ease of implementation and maintenance, and ablility to protect their investment
from vendor lock-in.

BUSINESS VALUE
Supermicro servers supporting the SUSE CaaS Platformoffer proven value in each of these areas:• Reasonable cost of acquisition: Supermicro and SUSE are recognized leaders in priceperformance in their respective market spaces. While Total Cost of Acquisition quickly
increases with more expensive solutions, it is also true is that performance, reliability,and value quickly decline with lower priced options. Supermicro and SUSE together offer
maximum value in terms of performance and reliability.

• Ease of implementation: While cloud based solutions are often the fastest to implement,

they can suffer from hidden limitations that such as difficulty/inability to work with
off-platform applications and a lack of configurability that can turn the easiest option
into the biggest liability. On the other end of the application spectrum, unsupported
open source software can offer ample configurability, if delivered by a staff of well-paid
experts. Supermicro and SUSE can strike the perfect compromise by working closely
together to provide a near turn-key experience to their customers. SUSE consultants
can quickly integrate Supermicro servers, preloaded with SUSE Enterprise Linux, into an
Enterprise class Kubernetes platform. There is no need to invest weeks or even months ofdevelopment to reach the production stage, and most importantly there is no need for ateam of top-level developers to maintain the Kubernetes cluster.

• Protect against vendor lock-in: proprietary products can create unnecessary vendor lock-in.
Turn-key Kubernetes offerings are often difficult or impossible to integrate with softwarethat isn’t provided by the same vendor. For that reason SUSE has consistently maintained
its open source, enterprise class software closer to upstream releases. This ensures SUSE
customers can interface with the latest software and hardware innovations, whether onpremises or cloud-provided. At the same time, highly scalable Supermicro Ultra, BigTwin,and Storage servers support a wide range of standards and options supporting up to
44 CPU cores, 3TB of memory, high-performance NVMe storage available on each node,and support for a wide variety of workloads. These Supermicro solutions also support

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Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform

networking options such as SFP+, 10GBASE-T, 40G and InfiniBand, making them an ideal
choice for the SUSE-based CaaS platform.

SUSE CAAS PLATFORM• The SUSE CaaS Platform is an enterprise class container management solution thatenables IT and DevOps professionals to easily deploy, manage, and scale container-based
applications and services. It includes Kubernetes to automate lifecycle management ofmodern applications, and surrounding technologies that enrich Kubernetes and make theplatform itself easy to operate. As a result, enterprises that use the SUSE CaaS Platform canreduce application delivery cycle times and improve business agility.

• SUSE is focused on delivering an exceptional operator experience with the SUSE CaaS

Platform. With deep competencies in infrastructure, systems, process integration, platformsecurity, lifecycle management and enterprise-grade support, SUSE aims to ensure that IT
operations teams can deliver the power of Kubernetes to their users quickly, securely andefficiently.

REQUIREMENTS
Containerized workloads must be reliable, manageable and serviceable. These requirements span themultiple layers of such a solution, from the container host operating system to the container runtime
engine and the container orchestration system. Such demands must be span multiple generations of
IT infrastructure expectations, both forward and backward, even though the containerized workloads
themselves have vastly different to through agility and resiliency.
With SUSE CaaS Platform enterprise will:• Achieve faster time-to-value with an enterprise-ready container management platform,
built from industry-leading technologies, and delivered as a complete package, witheverything needed to quickly offer containerized services.

• Simplify management and control of container platforms with efficient installation, easy
scaling, and updated automation.

• Maximize return on investment, with a flexible, future-proof container services solution.

ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW
To maximize the time to value for a Supermicro Kubernetes Proof of Concept cluster, only theminimum required components have been included in this Reference Architecture. Following thisprinciple will ensure the quickest deployment and evaluation of the Supermicro servers and SUSE
CaaS Platform. This proof of concept architecture has been designed to accommodate non-mission
critical production workloads as well as fully mission critical applications utilizing the Kubernetes
cluster.

White Paper - March 20203

As previously mentioned, the SUSE CaaS Platform is an Enterprise class Kubernetes platform that
includes important software and services that differentiate from other solutions available it in themarketplace:• Skuba: The skuba utility is an open source software project initiated by SUSE to further

automate the deployment and up-and down-scaling of a Kubernetes cluster. It leverages
the well-known kubeadm project to cover virtually all of the manual and highly error pronetasks of building a Kubernetes cluster.

• CRI-O: While the Docker Community Edition container runtime engine enjoys a wide

adoption, it is not well suited for an extremely powerful container orchestrator like
Kubernetes. CRI-O is a light weight container runtime engine that was created to run
all Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant container images but unlike Docker, it isdesigned specifically to work with Kubernetes. CRI-O boasts a simpler codebase, lower
resource overhead, and a much smaller attack surface area as compared to Docker CE.

• Cilium: The networking demands for scale-out container workloads are highly complex.

A cluster needs, at a minimum, an overlay network that can integrate physical network
segments into a cohesive cluster specific network; routing policies to allow and prevent
traffic between specific containers as well between certain containers and the outside
world; plus the ability to dynamically grow or contract the overlay network and policies
based on real-time cluster changes. Most Kubernetes networking plugins suffer froma limited set of features or a design that lacks scalability. Cilium is a robust Container
Network Interface that implements VxLANs for highly scalable overlay networking andidentity aware security policies that only copies appropriate policies to the worker nodes
that need them. Cilium uniquely encrypts all communication between cluster nodes andestablishes encrypted communication channels, known as a Cluster Mesh, between SUSE
CaaS Platform clusters, regardless of where they are deployed; on-premises or in the cloud.
This allows applications in different clusters to communicate directly with the ability toload-balance incoming application requests across SUSE CaaS Platform clusters on different
compute/cloud platforms.

The Host Operating System for the SUSE CaaS Platform is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This is thelatest edition of one of the most robust Linux distributions. A variety of software packages can be
added to SLES but it is not recommended to run additional applications on the SUSE CaaS Platform
nodes. The Containers as a Service Platform subscription must be applied to each node and the
CaaSP4.x.x repositories enabled on each SUSE CaaS Platform node.

SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
Deployment Node
A single server is needed as the deployment platform for the SUSE CaaS Platform. Unlike prior versionof SUSE CaaS Platform, this node is not considered an administration node for two reasons. This node
can be used to deploy any number of SUSE CaaS Platform clusters. As well, the tools to administer a
SUSE CaaS Platform cluster are not restricted to this single node.
Master Node
The Kubernetes master node provides the Kubernetes control plane as well as maintains the etcd
key-value store. The control plane manages the state of the cluster nodes and pods, manages security
policies, cluster-wide networking, and storage assignments. A single master node is capable ofmanaging a high-performance non-mission critical cluster. However, for a highly available control
plane, a cluster must be deployed with a properly configured load balancer and three nodes to be
deployed as master nodes. A SUSE CaaS Platform cluster that has been deployed with a properly
configured load balancer and a single master node can be upgraded to provide a highly available
control plane with addtional master nodes.

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Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Worker Nodes
The SUSE CaaS Platform worker nodes are responsible for running customer workloads. They also runcertain control plane services to help manage encryption, networking, storage services and more. The
CRI-O container runtime engine works with Kubernetes to download and manage container images
and run containers inside Kubernetes pods.

NETWORKING ARCHITECTURE
The following networking requirements are required for a successful on-premises deployment:
Cluster Physical Network• A physical network with a dedicated broadcast domain is needed to support the SUSE

CaaS Platform cluster. It is not recommended that services beyond the scope of the SUSE
CaaS Platform cluster make use of this network since more than one CIDR block of IP
addresses will be allocated in this broadcast domain. All of the SUSE CaaS Platform cluster
nodes must be able to communicate on this network. This implementation leverages asingle 25Gb/s network switch for simplicity and low cost. For network redundancy it isrecommended that two switches be used for all data paths.

• A contiguous CIDR block of IP addresses must be available on the cluster physical network.
• Due to network isolation concerns, this implementation used a 1Gb/s network for Internet
access, but this is not strictly required.

• Dual, bonded network interfaces on each node was used to communicate on the 25Gb/s
network. A single network interface was used to communicate on the 1Gb/s network.

External Network Services• An external DNS service should be used to resolve, at a minimum, the Fully Qualified

Domain Name (FQDN) of the SUSE CaaS Platform master node. If a load balancer is used,
the FQDN of the load balancer VIP should be resolvable to allow for TLS certification
validation.

• Ensure all SUSE CaaS Platform nodes are pointed to a reliable, external NTP service.
• Ensure all SUSE CaaS Platform nodes have access to a software update repository for

installation and to facilitate upgrades over time. This can be in the form of an SMT/RMT
server or, with Internet access, https://scc.suse.com.

Internal networks• Known as the Overlay and Service networks, these are used by Kubernetes and theunderlying Cilium network plug-in to manage the internal cluster and container
connections.

• These internal network ranges should be planned prior to deployment, are usually non-routable network ranges and cannot be changed without redeploying the entire cluster.

White Paper - March 2020

5

NETWORK ADDRESS CONFIGURATIONFUNCTION
Core

ROLE

HOSTNAME

IP ADDRESSManagement Workstation deployer.caaspv4.com

192.168.100.5

Overlay Networkn/a

10.2.0.0/16

Service Networkn/a

10.3.0.0/16

Mastermaster.caaspv4.com

192.168.100.1

Worker1

worker1.caaspv4.com

192.168.100.2

Worker2

worker2.caaspv4.com

192.168.100.3

Worker3

worker3.caaspv4.com

192.168.100.4

Cluster

Nodes

DEPLOYMENT
Data
Switches
IPMI/MGMT
Switch(TESTED HARDWARE)

COMPONENT TYPECOMPONENT DESCRIPTIONQUANTITY

Standard data center rack

1

SYS-6029TP-HC1R

1

SYS-6029-E1CR24L

4

Data switches (25G)

SSE-F3548S

2

IPMI/MGMT switch (10G)

SSE-X3348T

1

Admin
Node

Rack

Master
NodeServers

WorkerNodes

6SUPERMICRO RACK SPECIFICATIONSSupermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform

SERVER COMPONENTS FIRMWARE VERSIONSNOTE: The versions listed below are the versions that were available at the time this Reference
Architecture was developed. Ensure that the firmware on all servers, storage devices, and switches are
up to date.

FIRMWARE VERSIONSCOMPONENTVERSION

BMC

01.46

BIOS

2.0

REDFISH

1.0.1

SUPERMICRO SERVERS SPECIFICATIONS
SYS-6029TP-HC1R(SINGLE NODE)

SSG-6029P-E1CR24L

2x P4X-SKL4116T-SR3MQ(12C/24T 2.1G 16.5M 9.6GT 85W)

2x P4X-SKL4116T-SR3MQ(12C/24T 2.1G 16.5M 9.6GT 85W)

16x MEM-DR416L-CL07-ER26(192GB)

16x MEM-DR416L-CL07-ER26(192GB)

2.5" OS SATA drive

2x HDS-S2T1-MZ7LH240HAHQ05(240GB SATA3 2.5")

3.5" Data Disk-

4x HDD-A14T-WUH721414AL4204(14TB SAS, 3.5")

SIOM (Network)

AOC-MH25G-m2S2TM

AOC-MH25G-m2S2TM

BASE SERVER MODEL
CPU

RAM

AOC (Network)
RAID Card

1 AOC-S25G-i2S
1 AOC-S25G-m2S(25GbE dual-port SFP28, PCI-E 3.0 x8) (25GbE dual-port SFP28, PCI-E 3.0 x8)
1 Broadcom 3108 SAS3 controller

1 Broadcom 3008 SAS3, IT mode

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7

RECOMMENDED HARDWAREROLE

QUANTITYDESCRIPTIONManagement Workstation

1

SYS-5019P-WTR

Master Node1

SYS-6019U-TN4RT

Worker Node(s)3

SYS-6019U-TN4RTNOTESRECOMMENDED SOFTWAREROLE

QUANTITYDESCRIPTIONNOTESSoftware

5

SUSE CaaS Platform, x86-64, 1-2
Sockets or 1 Virtual Machine, L3Priority Subscription, 3 year

Includes Management
Workstation, Master/Worker
Nodes

HARDWARE DEPLOYMENT CONFIGURATION
The following considerations for the system platforms should be followed:• Any Supermicro hosts that have completed the SUSE YES certification for the appropriate
version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can be used for the physical nodes of thisdeployment.

• Reset the BIOS setup configuration on all hosts to the default setting to have a known
baseline configuration to provide consistency.

• If possible, setup RAID1 mirroring on the storage controller across a pair of drives for theoperating system installation• Ensure that all similar system devices are consistent and up-to-date with regard to BIOS/
uEFI/device firmware versions to reduce potential troubleshooting issues later

SOFTWARE DEPLOYMENT CONFIGURATION• From the SUSE Downloads website, obtain the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installation
media (DVD1)• From the SUSE Customer Center website, obtain enough trial or purchased subscriptions
for the SUSE CaaS Platform to apply to all of the cluster hosts.

MANAGEMENT WORKSTATION• A separate SUSE Linux Enterprise host is needed as a platform to deploy the SUSE CaaS

Platform cluster. This host can be used to deploy and manage one or more SUSE CaaS
Platform clusters, as long as it has LAN and/or Internet access to the infrastructure that will
support each cluster. A single Management Workstation can support both on-premises andcloud-based SUSE CaaS Platform clusters.

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Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform• A Management Workstation can be used as a central point of administration for any SUSE
CaaS Platform clusters, even if it was not the Management Workstation that deployed acluster.

• In this reference architecture the Management Workstation will provide the AutoYaST
installation files that will be used to automatically install the worker nodes.

• The resource requirements of the Management Workstation are minimal. A 60GB bootdrive, 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores at minimum will ensure adequate capacity andperformance.

• Deploying the Management Workstation as a virtual machine is beyond the scope of thisdocument. The additional requirements primarily involve access to the Internet and the
SUSE CaaS Platform cluster network.

IMPORTANT: Installation procedures for sites without Internet access, aka “Dark Sites”, arebeyond the scope of this document.
NOTE: This Reference Architecture is not intended to provide accurate deployment
instructions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Before attempting an installation, be sure
to familiarize yourself and carefully follow the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Deployment
Guide.
During the installation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system, observe the following
guidelines:• The DVD installation media can be provided to the host either as a physical DVD or as
virtual media through Supermicro IPMI.

• When booting from the installation media, a pause will occur at the GRuB screenoooUse the down arrow to select “Installation”, but DO NOT PRESS ENTER.
On the line below enter the following: ifcfg=eth0=<IP address ofManagement Workstation>/<CIDR mask>,<IP address of default
gateway>,<IP address of DNS server>,<DNS search domain>
hostname=<hostname>.<domain>• i.e.
ifcfg=eth0=192.168.100.5/24,192.168.100.254,192.168.100.10,
caaspv4.com hostname=admin.caaspv4.com
Press Enter• The default partitioning scheme can be used, though you must disable “Enable Swap”• Create a regular user named “sles” and use its password as the Administrator password.
• Apply the subscription information for SUSE CaaS Platform 4.x.xooEnable the following repositories:• SUSE CaaS Platform 4.x.x
This should automatically enable the Basesystem Module and Containers Module• Desktop Applications Module

NOTE: A desktop environment is not needed for this installation. If you want a desktop
environment on the Management Workstation, all of the SUSE CaaS Platform nodes must
will also have one. There are ways around this, but they are beyond the scope of thisdocument.

• No software package adjustments are needed but it is recommended to disable the firewallon the final screen before initiating the install.

White Paper - March 20209

After the installation completes, finish configuring the Management Workstation:• Use the YaST tool to properly configure the Management Workstation’s network (i.e. enable802.3ad network port bonding) as appropriate
o See the Administration Guide for more information• Create password-less sudo for the cluster user (i.e. sles): echo “sles ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD: ALL” >> /etc/sudoers

An AutoYaST clone will be taken of the Management Workstation and will be used as the basis forauto-installing the SUSE CaaS Platform cluster nodes:
NOTE: This Reference Architecture is only intended to offer guidance for using AutoYaST
for this specific design. Additional information can be found in the AutoYaST Guide.

• Create an AutoYaST clone file of the Management Workstation: sudo yast2 clone_system• Move the resultant autoinst.xml file to a directory dedicated to maintaining the AutoYaST
templates for the SUSE CaaS Platform nodes• Make a copy of the autoinst.xml file for the Master Node and each of the three Worker
Nodes. Ensure each file contains the name of the node and ends in .xml

• Update the <hostname> entry of each file with the appropriate node’s hostname• Update the <ipaddr> entry of each file, that contains the Management Workstation’s

external IP address (not the 127.0.0.1 entry), with the appropriate node’s external IP address

Using AutoYaST to automatically install the SUSE CaaS Platform nodes requires that their AutoYaST
XML file be available during the node boot/installation. The Management Workstation will run a small
webserver in a Docker container to provide this file to each SUSE CaaS Platform node. The following
is a high level overview on how to set up that container. For more information see the Docker Open
Source Engine Guide.

• Install the Docker CE container runtime engine• Start and enable the Docker service• Launch the container: docker run --name <name of container>-v <FQPN of
directory containing the AutoYaST template files>:/usr/share/
nginx/html:ro -P -d nginx:latest• Take note of the network port assigned to nginx

MASTER NODE
• This reference architecture is based on all SUSE CaaS Platform nodes being configured
identically. This allows using AutoYaST to install all of the SUSE CaaS Platform nodes.

• While this reference architecture relies on highly capable servers, the minimum

recommended resources for the Master Node are 50GB of disk space, 4 GB of RAM, and 2
CPU cores.

10Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform

During the installation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system, observe the following
guidelines:• The DVD installation media can be provided to the host either as a physical DVD or as
virtual media through Supermicro IPMI.

• When booting from the installation media, a pause will occur at the GRuB screenoooUse the down arrow to select “Installation”, but DO NOT PRESS ENTER.
On the line below enter the following: autoyast=http://<FQDN ofManagement Workstation>:<nginx_port>/<name of Master NodeAutoYaST XML file> ifcfg=eth0=<IP address ofMaster Node>/<CIDR mask>,<IP address of default
gateway>,<IP address of DNS server>,<DNS search domain>
hostname=<hostname>.<domain>• i.e.
autoyast=http://admin.caaspv4.com:32768/master.xml
ifcfg=eth0=192.168.100.1/24,192.168.100.254,192.168.100.10,
caaspv4.com hostname=master.caaspv4.com
Press Enter• The entire installation should complete and then the host will reboot. Upon the first boot,the network bonding will be created and final installation steps completed.

WORKER NODES• As mentioned before, this reference architecture is based on all cluster nodes being
configured identically.

• While this reference architecture relies on highly capable servers, the minimum

recommend resources for the Worker Nodes is primarily dependent on the containerized
workload each node will sustain. Principles for calculating each resource are given in the
SUSE CaaS Platform Deployment Guide.

During the installation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system, observe the following
guidelines:• The DVD installation media can be provided to the host either as a physical DVD or virtual
media through Supermicro IPMI.

• When booting from the installation media, a pause will occur at the GRuB screenoooUse the down arrow to select “Installation”, but DO NOT PRESS ENTER.
On the line below enter the following: autoyast=http://<FQDN ofManagement Workstation>:<nginx_port>/<name of Worker NodeAutoYaST XML file> ifcfg=eth0=<IP address ofWorker Node>/<CIDR mask>,<IP address of default
gateway>,<IP address of DNS server>,<DNS search domain>
hostname=<hostname>.<domain>• i.e.
autoyast=http://admin.caaspv4.com:32768/worker1.xml
ifcfg=eth0=192.168.100.2/24,192.168.100.254,192.168.
100.10,caaspv4.com hostname=worker1.caaspv4.com
Press Enter

White Paper - March 202011• The entire installation should complete and then the host will reboot. Upon the first boot,the network bonding will be created and final installation steps completed.

• Repeat these steps once for each remaining worker node.
IMPORTANT: The follow section provides an overview of the process for bootstrapping the
SUSE CaaS Platform cluster. Before attempting to bootstrap a SUSE CaaS Platform cluster,be sure to familiarize yourself and carefully follow the SUSE CaaS Platform Deployment
Guide.

PREPARE THE MANAGEMENT WORKSTATION:• Ensure the Management Workstation has SLES, SUSE CaaS Platform 4.x.x, and theContainers Module must be registered, as per the Deployment Guide• Install the SUSE-CaaSP-Management software pattern• Ensure the SSH Agent is running and has loaded the user’s SSH key
INITIALIZE THE SUSE CAAS PLATFORM CLUSTER:• Use the skuba command to initialize the cluster: skuba cluster init --control-plane<FQDN of the Master Node>CaaS Platform cluster><name to be assigned to the SUSE

• Change directory into the cluster directory that was created
JOIN THE MASTER NODE TO THE CLUSTER:• Use the skuba command to join the Master Node to the cluster: skuba nodebootstrap --user sles --sudo –target <FQDN of the Master Node><name to be assigned to the Master Node>ADD THE WORKER NODES:• Use the skuba command to join a Worker Node to the cluster: skuba node bootstrap--user sles --sudo –target <FQDN of the Worker Node>be assigned to the Worker Node><name to• Repeat these steps once for each remaining worker node
VERIFY THE STATUS OF THE CLUSTER:• The status of the cluster can be verified with the skuba and/or the kubectl command:oo12

skuba cluster status
export KUBECONFIG=<FQPN of the cluster directory>/admin.conf;
kubectl get nodes -o wide

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform

Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution
using the SUSE CaaS Platform

KUBERNETES CONFORMANCE TESTS
A representative set of the upstream Kubernetes conformance test suite can be found at Heptio /Sonobuoy. This can be easily run via a browser on the client system that has access to the admin‘kubeconfig’ file as noted in the “Getting Started” section of this site. An example run can be seen in thefollowing screenshot:• Log into the client system’s command line, using the cluster’s admin ‘kubeconfig’, thenrefer to SUSE CaaS Platform FAQ and follow the steps in the “Monitoring Stack based on
Prometheus and Grafana” section.

ADDITIONAL DEPLOYMENT CONSIDERATIONS
Beyond the three distinct operational modes described in this document, some very convenient andtechnologically advanced features are included or can be extended:• Fine-grained, role-based access control, relying upon a local source can be easily

augmented for users with specific roles. In addition, federating to external, like LDAP/
AD, authentication/authorization sources can also be accomplished. Refer to the“Managing Users and Groups” and “Role Management” section in the SUSE CaaS Platform
Administration Guide to add other users. Then these configured users can login to the
web interface, download their respective ‘kubeconfig’ files and launch containers into theircreated or designated namespaces with their roles and access to the specified resources.

• An additional service to consider is a repository site for container images from whichto pull workloads. This can be a publicly-accessible site or can be a private collection ofworkload images. Other registry sites, either public or private, can be used to provide files,
like Helm Charts, to deploy complete services. An option to provide more fine-grained user
authorization and access to the container images is SUSE Portus.

• Various types of logs are available:ooooThe setup and configuration of the cluster
The operation of the cluster, including the containerized services and updates
The orchestration aspect of Kubernetes
More details, including locations to access and how to collect logs for external log
servers are included in the “Logging” section of the SUSE CaaS Platform Administration
Guide.

• Increasing the node count of the cluster is as easy as joining these to the cluster with theskuba command. For more information, see the “Adding Nodes” section of the SUSE CaaS
Platform Administration Guide.

• The density of containerized workloads is another topic to consider. As shown in someprevious sections covering around performance monitoring, one can collect the associatedmetrics of a given workload, kubectl top pods and the nodes, kubectl top nodes todetermine how many such workloads can be accommodated. Another approach, tobe executed during the launch of a manifest or helm chart, can specify the resource
requirements needed. Using this method, Kubernetes will honor this request during
the scheduling of the workloads to ensure, at launch, that the appropriate resources arepresent on the target node. It is also important to ensure that both networking and I/O ofstorage resources are taken into consideration.

• Other factors like certificate management, security, graceful shutdown and startup of thecluster, and troubleshooting are covered in the SUSE CaaS Platform Administration Guide.

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13

SUMMARY
Combining the features of Supermicro servers with software from the SUSE CaaS Platform yields a robust, powerful and flexible container-as-a-service
infrastructure. No matter what stage of transition your organization has achieved with containerized workloads, this deployment allows industry standard
compatibility coupled with industry leading support and operational ease. Any business can feel confident in the ability to rapidly and professionallyaddress the continued growth in their container developments and usage.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This document is contributed by Alex Arnoldy at SUSE and Ravi Chintala at Super Micro Computer, Inc.

RESOURCES
Supermicro

SUSE

•
•
•
•
•
•

•
•
•

SSG-6029P-E1CR24L
SYS-6029TP-HC1R
SSE-X3348T

SUSE CaaS Platform
Documentation
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SSE-F3548S
SYS-6019U-TN4RT
SYS-5019P-WTR

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Supermicro-SUSE Kubernetes solution using the SUSE CaaS Platform