Tuning NCP parameters for increased PKS scaling

Products

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition

Issue/Introduction

Starting from VMware Enterprise PKS 1.4.1, you can manually tune NCP heart beat and rate limits parameters to help scale your PKS deployments. Note that these changes are applicable to NCP 2.4.x only. The following parameters that are part of the NCP.ini file are tunable:

• master_timeout
• heartbeat_period
• update_timeout

In NCP 2.4.1, the recommended values for the above parameters are:

• master_timeout = 18
• heartbeat_period = 6
• update_timeout = master_timeout – heartbeart_period = 12

The description for each of these parameters is available under Configmap for ncp.ini in ncp-rc.yml section in the NSX Container Plug-in for Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry Documentation . This documentation lists all parameters in the ncp.ini file, however only the above 3 are configurable with PKS v1.4.1.

Environment

Resolution

To perform the updates, use the Ops Manager Command Line Interface (CLI). For more information, see the "updating a simple property" section in the Ops Manager Application Program Interface (API) documentation.

Instructions to update these parameters in the PKS Tile:

1. Get the PKS product GUID using the Ops Manager CLI:

# om -k -t <opsman_IP> -u <opsman_username> -p "<opsman_password>" curl -s -p '/api/v0/staged/products' | jq -cr '.[] | select( .type=="pivotal-container-service" ) | .guid'

Sample Output:

pivotal-container-service-0d2397b6f4b0ca35be13

Export it as PKS_GUID:

export PKS_GUID=pivotal-container-service-0d2397b6f4b0ca35be13

Or

export PKS_GUID=$(om -k -t <opsman_IP> -u <opsman_username> -p "<opsman_password>" curl -s -p '/api/v0/staged/products' | jq -cr '.[] | select( .type=="pivotal-container-service" ) | .guid')

2. Update the property values for below parameters:

".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-master-timeout" ".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-heartbeat-period" ".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-update-timeout"

For example, the following commands will update them to 18.6.12

om -k -t <opsman_IP> -u <opsman_username> -p '<opsman_password>' curl -x PUT -p "/api/v0/staged/products/${PKS_GUID}/properties" - d '{ "properties": { ".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-master-timeout": { "value": 18}, ".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-heartbeat-period": { "value": 6}, ".properties.network_selector.nsx.ncp-ha-update- timeout": { "value": 12} }}'

3. After this change, you need to apply-changes on the PKS tile to make it take effect:

• New clusters will be deployed with the new values.
• If upgrade-all-instances errand is enabled, all existing clusters will be updated to new values during apply-changes.