Create and configure an Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) cluster to use virtual nodes in the Azure portal
This article shows you how to use the Azure portal to create and configure the virtual network resources and an AKS cluster with virtual nodes enabled.
Note
This article gives you an overview of the region availability and limitations using virtual nodes.
Before you begin
Virtual nodes enable network communication between pods that run in Azure Container Instances (ACI) and the AKS cluster. To provide this communication, a virtual network subnet is created and delegated permissions are assigned. Virtual nodes only work with AKS clusters created using advanced networking (Azure CNI). By default, AKS clusters are created with basic networking (kubenet). This article shows you how to create a virtual network and subnets, then deploy an AKS cluster that uses advanced networking.
If you have not previously used ACI, register the service provider with your subscription. You can check the status of the ACI provider registration using the az provider list command, as shown in the following example:
az provider list --query "[?contains(namespace,'Microsoft.ContainerInstance')]" -o table
The Microsoft.ContainerInstance provider should report as Registered, as shown in the following example output:
Namespace RegistrationState RegistrationPolicy
--------------------------- ------------------- --------------------
Microsoft.ContainerInstance Registered RegistrationRequired
If the provider shows as NotRegistered, register the provider using the az provider register as shown in the following example:
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ContainerInstance
Sign in to Azure
Sign in to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com.
Create an AKS cluster
In the top left-hand corner of the Azure portal, select Create a resource > Kubernetes Service.
On the Basics page, configure the following options:
- PROJECT DETAILS: Select an Azure subscription, then select or create an Azure resource group, such as myResourceGroup. Enter a Kubernetes cluster name, such as myAKSCluster.
- CLUSTER DETAILS: Select a region and Kubernetes version for the AKS cluster.
- PRIMARY NODE POOL: Select a VM size for the AKS nodes. The VM size cannot be changed once an AKS cluster has been deployed.
- Select the number of nodes to deploy into the cluster. For this article, set Node count to 1. Node count can be adjusted after the cluster has been deployed.
Click Next: Node Pools.
On the Node Pools page, select Enable virtual nodes.
By default, a cluster identity is created. This cluster identity is used for cluster communication and integration with other Azure services. By default, this cluster identity is a managed identity. For more information, see Use managed identities. You can also use a service principal as your cluster identity.
The cluster is also configured for advanced networking. The virtual nodes are configured to use their own Azure virtual network subnet. This subnet has delegated permissions to connect Azure resources between the AKS cluster. If you don't already have delegated subnet, the Azure portal creates and configures the Azure virtual network and subnet for use with the virtual nodes.
Select Review + create. After the validation is complete, select Create.
It takes a few minutes to create the AKS cluster and to be ready for use.
Connect to the cluster
The Azure Cloud Shell is a free interactive shell that you can use to run the steps in this article. It has common Azure tools preinstalled and configured to use with your account. To manage a Kubernetes cluster, use kubectl, the Kubernetes command-line client. The kubectl client is pre-installed in the Azure Cloud Shell.
To open the Cloud Shell, select Try it from the upper right corner of a code block. You can also launch Cloud Shell in a separate browser tab by going to https://shell.azure.com/bash. Select Copy to copy the blocks of code, paste it into the Cloud Shell, and press enter to run it.
Use the az aks get-credentials command to configure kubectl to connect to your Kubernetes cluster. The following example gets credentials for the cluster name myAKSCluster in the resource group named myResourceGroup:
az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster
To verify the connection to your cluster, use the kubectl get command to return a list of the cluster nodes.
kubectl get nodes
The following example output shows the single VM node created and then the virtual node for Linux, virtual-node-aci-linux:
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
virtual-node-aci-linux Ready agent 28m v1.11.2
aks-agentpool-14693408-0 Ready agent 32m v1.11.2
Deploy a sample app
In the Azure Cloud Shell, create a file named virtual-node.yaml and copy in the following YAML. To schedule the container on the node, a nodeSelector and toleration are defined. These settings allow the pod to be scheduled on the virtual node and confirm that the feature is successfully enabled.
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: aci-helloworld
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: aci-helloworld
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: aci-helloworld
spec:
containers:
- name: aci-helloworld
image: mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld
ports:
- containerPort: 80
nodeSelector:
kubernetes.io/role: agent
beta.kubernetes.io/os: linux
type: virtual-kubelet
tolerations:
- key: virtual-kubelet.io/provider
operator: Exists
Run the application with the kubectl apply command.
kubectl apply -f virtual-node.yaml
Use the kubectl get pods command with the -o wide argument to output a list of pods and the scheduled node. Notice that the virtual-node-helloworld pod has been scheduled on the virtual-node-linux node.
kubectl get pods -o wide
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE IP NODE
virtual-node-helloworld-9b55975f-bnmfl 1/1 Running 0 4m 10.241.0.4 virtual-node-aci-linux
The pod is assigned an internal IP address from the Azure virtual network subnet delegated for use with virtual nodes.
Note
If you use images stored in Azure Container Registry, configure and use a Kubernetes secret. A current limitation of virtual nodes is that you can't use integrated Azure AD service principal authentication. If you don't use a secret, pods scheduled on virtual nodes fail to start and report the error HTTP response status code 400 error code "InaccessibleImage".
Test the virtual node pod
To test the pod running on the virtual node, browse to the demo application with a web client. As the pod is assigned an internal IP address, you can quickly test this connectivity from another pod on the AKS cluster. Create a test pod and attach a terminal session to it:
kubectl run -it --rm virtual-node-test --image=mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/runtime-deps:6.0
Install curl in the pod using apt-get:
apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl
Now access the address of your pod using curl, such as http://10.241.0.4. Provide your own internal IP address shown in the previous kubectl get pods command:
curl -L http://10.241.0.4
The demo application is displayed, as shown in the following condensed example output:
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Azure Container Instances!</title>
</head>
[...]
Close the terminal session to your test pod with exit. When your session is ended, the pod is the deleted.
Next steps
In this article, a pod was scheduled on the virtual node and assigned a private, internal IP address. You could instead create a service deployment and route traffic to your pod through a load balancer or ingress controller. For more information, see Create a basic ingress controller in AKS.
Virtual nodes are one component of a scaling solution in AKS. For more information on scaling solutions, see the following articles:
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