Create Palette Virtual Clusters
Palette Virtual Clusters are nested Kubernetes clusters within a Host Cluster. Virtual clusters share the host cluster resources, such as CPU, memory, storage, container network interface (CNI), and container storage interface (CSI). Virtual clusters use the CNCF Kubernetes distribution. Virtual clusters are supported in both connected and airgapped environments.
On Palette VerteX, virtual clusters use a FIPS-compiled vCluster pack automatically, so strict-FIPS tenants can provision virtual clusters without additional configuration.
Palette provisions and orchestrates virtual clusters to make the lightweight Kubernetes technology stack and tools ecosystem available to you. Deploy virtual clusters on both new and imported Host Clusters and attach application profiles.
Palette also supports Day-2 operations such as upgrades, backup, and restore to keep virtual clusters secure, compliant, and up to date. Additionally, Palette provides visibility into the workloads deployed inside your virtual clusters and the associated costs.
Get Started
To get started, refer to Deploy a Virtual Cluster to a Cluster Group.
Kubernetes Distribution
Virtual clusters use the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes distribution. Refer to Create and Manage Cluster Groups for guidance on configuring your cluster group.
Minimum Resource Requirements
The following table lists the minimum resource requirements for virtual clusters.
| Resource Type | Default | Minimum Limit |
|---|---|---|
| CPU (per request) | 4 | 4 |
| Memory (per request) | 4 GiB | 4 GiB |
| Storage (per request) | 2 GiB | 2 GiB |
Network Connectivity
Virtual clusters support two network endpoint types: Load Balancer and Ingress. The network endpoint type determines how virtual clusters are exposed to external traffic. You specify the network endpoint type in Cluster Group Settings.
-
Load Balancer: The Host Cluster must support dynamic provisioning of load balancers, either via a Cloud Controller Manager in the public cloud or a bare metal load balancer provider such as MetalLB.
-
Ingress: The Nginx Ingress Controller must be deployed on the Host Cluster with SSL passthrough enabled. This allows TLS termination to occur at the virtual cluster's Kubernetes API server.
A wildcard DNS record must be configured that maps to the load balancer associated with the NGINX Ingress Controller. For example:
*.myapp.mydomain.com
Upgrade Virtual Clusters
The vCluster version may be updated in a Palette release, which can introduce breaking changes that affect newly created virtual clusters.
To avoid disruptions, Palette locks the vCluster version for each cluster group, ensuring virtual clusters can still be provisioned successfully within existing groups, even across Palette updates.
If you want to use the latest version of vCluster on your virtual clusters, you must prompt Palette to upgrade your cluster group at a time that suits you. Refer to Upgrade Cluster Groups for guidance.
The Palette agent on a virtual cluster upgrades separately from the vCluster version of its cluster group. Do not let the Palette agent on a virtual cluster upgrade before the Palette agent on its host cluster. Refer to Agent Upgrades for Virtual Clusters for the upgrade order.