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Installing SeeSaw load balancers

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This page lists the installation and configuration instructions for the SeeSaw managed load balancer.

Seesaw is the default managed network load balancer installed in an Anthos Clusters on VMware environment from versions 1.6 to 1.10.

Installing The SeeSaw load balancer

The SeeSaw load balancer is fully integrated with Anthos Clusters on VMware and has automated deployment performed as part of the Admin and User cluster setups. There are blocks of text in the cluster.yaml configuration files that must be modified to provide load balancer info, and then there is an additional step prior to cluster deployment to deploy the load balancer using the built in gkectl tool.

Note SeeSaw load balancers can be deployed in HA or non-HA mode. For the purpose of this validation, the SeeSaw load balancer was deployed in non-HA mode, which is the default setting. For production purposes, NetApp recommends deploying SeeSaw in an HA configuration for fault tolerance and reliability.

Integration with Anthos

There is a section in each configuration file, respectively for the admin cluster, and in each user cluster that you choose to deploy to configure the load balancer so that it is managed by Anthos On-Prem.

The following text is a sample from the configuration of the partition for the GKE-Admin cluster. The values that need to be uncommented and modified are placed in bold text below:

loadBalancer:
  # (Required) The VIPs to use for load balancing
  vips:
    # Used to connect to the Kubernetes API
    controlPlaneVIP: "10.61.181.230"
    # # (Optional) Used for admin cluster addons (needed for multi cluster features). Must
    # # be the same across clusters
    # # addonsVIP: ""
  # (Required) Which load balancer to use "F5BigIP" "Seesaw" or "ManualLB". Uncomment
  # the corresponding field below to provide the detailed spec
  kind: Seesaw
  # # (Required when using "ManualLB" kind) Specify pre-defined nodeports
  # manualLB:
  #   # NodePort for ingress service's http (only needed for user cluster)
  #   ingressHTTPNodePort: 0
  #   # NodePort for ingress service's https (only needed for user cluster)
  #   ingressHTTPSNodePort: 0
  #   # NodePort for control plane service
  #   controlPlaneNodePort: 30968
  #   # NodePort for addon service (only needed for admin cluster)
  #   addonsNodePort: 31405
  # # (Required when using "F5BigIP" kind) Specify the already-existing partition and
  # # credentials
  # f5BigIP:
  #   address:
  #   credentials:
  #     username:
  #     password:
  #   partition:
  #   # # (Optional) Specify a pool name if using SNAT
  #   # snatPoolName: ""
  # (Required when using "Seesaw" kind) Specify the Seesaw configs
  seesaw:
  # (Required) The absolute or relative path to the yaml file to use for IP allocation
  #  for LB VMs. Must contain one or two IPs.
  ipBlockFilePath: "admin-seesaw-block.yaml"
  #   (Required) The Virtual Router IDentifier of VRRP for the Seesaw group. Must
  #   be between 1-255 and unique in a VLAN.
    vrid: 100
  #   (Required) The IP announced by the master of Seesaw group
    masterIP: "10.61.181.236"
  #   (Required) The number CPUs per machine
    cpus: 1
  #   (Required) Memory size in MB per machine
    memoryMB: 2048
  #   (Optional) Network that the LB interface of Seesaw runs in (default: cluster
  #   network)
    vCenter:
  #   vSphere network name
      networkName: VM_Network
  #   (Optional) Run two LB VMs to achieve high availability (default: false)
    enableHA: false

The SeeSaw load balancer also has a separate static seesaw-block.yaml file that you must provide for each cluster deployment. This file must be located in the same directory relative to the cluster.yaml deployment file, or the full path must be specified in the section above.

A sample of the admin-seesaw-block.yaml file looks like the following script:

blocks:
  - netmask: "255.255.255.0"
    gateway: "10.63.172.1"
    ips:
    - ip: "10.63.172.152"
      hostname: "admin-seesaw-vm"
Note This file provides the gateway and netmask for the network that the load balancer provides to the underlying cluster, as well as the management IP and hostname for the virtual machine that is deployed to run the load balancer.