[ninkendo]

Ouch. Way to bury the lede!

Is this ever going to be a bare-metal thing? Like probably many others, I'm not really interested in doing on-prem virtualization... kubernetes is interesting to me because containers are a better abstraction than virtual machines in the first place. Why add a virtualization layer if you don't have to?

(I get that it makes your life easier as the developer of this product, but having to run a virtualization IaaS between your metal and your orchestration makes the whole thing rather uninteresting IMO.)

[thockingoog]

I feel like I have to say this, even if people get it already.

Walk before you run.

Bare metal is a LOT harder to manage because, well, hardware fails. We hear the demand, for sure, but vSphere represents walking (and has a lot of customers, too :)

[ninkendo]

Sure, I get why the decision was made.

But, I don't buy the hardware failure argument, because the same is true of running a vsphere installation in the first place.

vsphere migrates VMs to other machines when the hardware fails, but, analogously, the kube scheduler moves pods to other machines when they fail as well. You have to worry about disk failures in both cases. You have to worry about keeping your vsphere's database up and in a high-availability mode (postgres in my experience), just as you have to worry about keeping k8s's etcd cluster up and in a high-availability mode.

For any problem k8s has on bare metal due to hardware unreliability, vsphere has an analogous problem, it's just pushed down one layer.

IMO the real reason why this is a pragmatic decision is because, people already have lots of experience in running vsphere and understand where the risks and challenges are, and vsphere has lots of tools for things like automating the installation of the hypervisor OS, base level network setup, expectations around NFS for VM storage, etc.

Vsphere represents a decent, known set of tools for getting an infrastructure up and running on bare metal, which is a prerequisite for getting kubernetes running, but what would be exciting to me would be a rethinking of those infrastructure components in a purely open source and industry standard fashion, in a no-frills way that only exists to get a basic k8s control plane up.

[alxbog]

Totally agree with this point of view.

[karangoeluw]

There are definitely enterprises looking to move away from virtualization. We have that in mind.

We are exploring additional options, such as bare metal support, based on customer demand.

Send me an email (karangoel [at] google) if you'd be interested in talking more about bare metal.

[rushins]

hello karan

so what is the model for bare metal with GKE on-prem. The reason is for VSPHERE 6.5 is additional cost (license per cores to VMWARE and VCENTER license) which we want to avoid to use bare metal only.

[alxbog]

+1 for Bare Metal support.

[rushins]

i definately want to see bare metal with GKE on-prem as VSPHER E is additional cost