Setting up the vSphere Cloud Provider

In this section, you'll learn how to set up the vSphere cloud provider for a Rancher managed RKE Kubernetes cluster in vSphere.

Follow these steps while creating the vSphere cluster in Rancher:

1. Set Cloud Provider option to Custom.

   

2. Click on Edit as YAML

3. Insert the following structure to the pre-populated cluster YAML. As of Rancher v2.3+, this structure must be placed under rancher_kubernetes_engine_config. In versions before v2.3, it has to be defined as a top-level field. Note that the name must be set to vsphere.

   rancher_kubernetes_engine_config: # Required as of Rancher v2.3+
     cloud_provider:
         name: vsphere
         vsphereCloudProvider:
             [Insert provider configuration]

Rancher uses RKE (the Rancher Kubernetes Engine) to provision Kubernetes clusters. Refer to the vSphere configuration reference in the RKE documentation for details about the properties of the vsphereCloudProvider directive.