Enable VM tracking

This document shows how to enable VM tracking with vSphere tags when you create a new user cluster.

Each node in your cluster is a VM. When VM tracking is enabled, Google Distributed Cloud attaches tags to your cluster worker nodes and control-plane nodes. You can use the tags to select VMs that belong to a particular user cluster or node pool.

Each control-plane node is given a tag that specifies the cluster name.

Each worker node is given two tags: one that specifies the cluster name and one that specifies both the cluster name and the nodepool name.

Before you begin

You can enable VM tracking when you create a new user cluster. You cannot enable VM tracking by updating an existing cluster.

Create vSphere categories

Create these vSphere categories on the vCenter server specified by vCenter.address in your admin cluster configuration file.

  • machine.onprem.gke.io/cluster-name
  • machine.onprem.gke.io/cluster-name/nodepool-name

Grant privileges

Grant these vSphere privileges to the vCenter credentials specified in your user cluster configuration file:

  • vSphere Tagging.Assign or Unassign vSphere Tag
  • vSphere Tagging.Assign or Unassign vSphere Tag on Object (vSphere 7.0)
  • vSphere Tagging.Create vSphere Tag
  • vSphere Tagging.Delete vSphere Tag

Enable VM tracking

  1. In your user cluster configuration file, set enableVMTracking to true.

  2. Create your user cluster.

View the VMs that have an attached tag

In the vSphere web client, you can view the VMs that have a particular tag attached. For example, to view all the VMs in your user cluster, go to Tags & Custom Attributes. Then select the tag that belongs to machine.onprem.gke.io/cluster-name and has the same name as your user cluster.