How to setup and use Karbon

  • 10 February 2020
  • 8 replies
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What is Karbon?

Nutanix Karbon is a curated turnkey offering that provides simplified provisioning and operations of Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for deploying and managing container-based applications.

The Karbon web console simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters with a simple GUI and built-in event monitoring tools.

There are built-in add-ons such as Kibana and Prometheus for parsing logs and monitoring alert triggering mechanism in you cluster.

Using Karbon you can: 

  • Deploy Kubernetes clusters.
  • Use Nutanix Volumes and Nutanix Files storage for your applications.
  • Manage Kubernetes cluster resources.
  • Upgrade your Kubernetes deployment.
  • Ensure high-availability.

To set up your Karbon environment, perform the following tasks:

 


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Hello @jmoro,

Karbon Cluster doesn’t require Calm or App management enabled.

Could you open a support case? There’s probably something in the karbon-core logs that support can use to figure out why the container wasn’t started.

Hi @vshuguet 

Thanks, for your suggestion. The last PC update (2020.8), solved the problem. I forgot to comment on the post about it.

Thanks to all for your help.

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Oh, okay.

Creating a cluster using the CLI is beyond the scope of the general Karbon documentation.

However, we have the process documented in this KB article: https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/9601

Best regards,

Hi @vshuguet,

I want to get same outcome like first post in this thread but automatically, without any user intervention (except a few as possible configuration details in file). I found the APIs documentation and mentioned, but it is almost impossible to write such document without deep knowledge of what exactly each step in process do (much deeper level than what it is written there).

Ideally, something like:

karbonctl create-cluster -f configuration.json

Would be best, but I couldn’t find such option.

Thanks

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Hello @Assaf Katz ,

Can you explain what you want to do exactly?

Karbon Cluster does have APIs, you can find them documented here: https://www.nutanix.dev/reference/karbon/

We also have a CLI called karbonctl that you can find on your Prism Central VM in the folder:

~nutanix/karbon/ 

 

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Hello @jmoro,

Karbon Cluster doesn’t require Calm or App management enabled.

Could you open a support case? There’s probably something in the karbon-core logs that support can use to figure out why the container wasn’t started.

Hi,

Is there option to do it through API or CLI? We want to use IaaC (actually GitOps) and the steps through GUI cannot be used…

Thanks

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Hello @Jubran 

 

We have a problem with Karbon. We can’t download images from the UI. We have activated browser developer options to see the calls to API.

When we click the button “Donwload Centos” the browser shows this. The first one error is just loading the page. The second is when button is clicked.
 

 

Reading your links we checked “docker ps” to see if the containers are running. Only UI was started. After restarting “karbon-core” and “karbon-ui” containers, the core container ends failing again.
 

PCVM:~$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
ad6a66b6b524 karbon-core:v2.1.0 "/karbon -debug=tr..." 1 second ago Up Less than a second (health: starting) karbon-core
2fa0a11ca907 karbon-ui:v2.1.0 "/start.sh" About a minute ago Up About a minute (healthy) karbon-ui
PCVM:~$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
2fa0a11ca907 karbon-ui:v2.1.0 "/start.sh" 5 minutes ago Up 5 minutes (healthy) karbon-ui

Any idea of what could be the problem?

One more question: Does Karbon need to have Calm enabled or App management? We don’t have enabled this services (calm & epsilon).

 

Regards.
Javier

 

Additionally, if you run into any issues here are the Top 4 KB Articles on Karbon right now:

https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7230 - [Karbon] Special Consideration deploying Karbon in a proxy environment | Unable to Download Centos Host Image | Deployment failure in ETCD Phase


https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7297 - [Karbon] failed to deploy etcd profile on nodes xxxx Operation timed out: client: etcd cluster is unavailable or misconfigured; error #0: dial tcp x.x.x.x:2379: getsockopt: connection refused


https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7580 - [Karbon] Host Image Missing for Download | Error in UI: "Error in Getting the list of the available host OS images from the Release Portal"


https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/7387 - [Karbon] Karbon UI does not use Custom SSL Certificate uploaded to Prism Central