Best way to configure Kubernetes on local server

Question

Through a stroke of luck I've been given an extremely powerful server in my office - I'd love to somehow set up a replica of our staging Kubernetes environment on it. Our staging Kube environment is 5 nodes running on AWS that each have different configurations. I can't find much in the way of best practice guides (probably because this is a very weird use case) for this configuration.

My gut feel is this:

• Install some kind of bare metal OS on the machine
• Set up multiple VMs on the machine each configured to mirror a node from staging
• Install the Kube master on one of the machines
• Enrol each of the other VMs as a node under kubernetes
• Run my deployments

Is there any better way for me to configure this or any potential issues I may hit/roadblocks if I follow this approach?

Answer 1

If you want to have it everything in one machine, I would also go for the multi-vm option. With Vagrant you could try to make the process simpler. This could help you:

https://github.com/pires/kubernetes-vagrant-coreos-cluster

After setting up the cluster you could adapt it to mimic the state of your staging cluster.

The only issue that comes to mind is that of overlay networking an external access. If you configure NAT networking you would have issues with external access and probably no issue with the network overlay. On the other side, I am not 100% certain how the overlay network would work in a bridged setting.