Third Party Providers#

You can use the ICE ClusterWare ™ platform with third party hardware providers. The third party provider configures the hardware and then the ClusterWare software manages the configured hardware as compute node(s). The ClusterWare software maintains control over the cluster. Use the cw-clusterctl providers command to manage the provider-specific aspects of the allocated hardware and virtual machines.

Currently, virsh and KubeVirt are supported. You can have multiple provider instances of the same type. For example, if you have both a local Kubernetes cluster and cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, you can create a KubeVirt provider instance for each.

To create a new provider instance, specify a name, type, and specification:

cw-clusterctl providers create name=<name> type=<type> spec='{"<value>": "<value>"}'

Where

  • <name> is the name you give the provider.

  • <type> is one of virsh or kubevirt.

  • The spec= value varies by provider type. See KubeVirt Provider and Virsh Provider for details.

After setting up the provider, you can view available resources, including systems that are allocated to your account, but not attached to ClusterWare nodes. For example:

cw-clusterctl providers -i <name> resources

Allocate additional virtual or bare metal machines from the provider using the alloc argument and attach the machines to ClusterWare nodes using attach. Attached machines are accessible just like any other ClusterWare node.

When you are finished with a resource, return it to the provider using release.

See cw-clusterctl for a full list of provider-related arguments.