VKS Lab

VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) lab environment — infrastructure-as-documentation for a home lab running vSphere with Tanzu.

Documentation

Document	Description	PDF
Conceptual Design	Purpose, objectives, and high-level architecture	PDF
Logical Design	Architecture overview and service topology	PDF
Physical Design	VLANs, subnets, and hardware layout	PDF
Delivery Guide	Step-by-step deployment instructions	PDF
Operations Guide	Standard operating procedures and troubleshooting	PDF

Ansible Automation

Ansible roles and playbooks automate all 6 deployment phases. Runs from the operator's laptop via SSH ProxyJump through the gateway, with secrets from 1Password.

# Install collections
ansible-galaxy collection install -r ansible/collections/requirements.yml

# Run full deployment (all 6 phases)
ansible-playbook -i ansible/inventory/hosts.yml ansible/playbooks/site.yml

# Run a single phase
ansible-playbook -i ansible/inventory/hosts.yml ansible/playbooks/phase2_esxi.yml

# Dry run
ansible-playbook -i ansible/inventory/hosts.yml ansible/playbooks/phase2_esxi.yml --check

See ansible/ for roles, custom VCF modules, and inventory configuration.

Getting Started

Start with the Delivery Guide for deployment instructions.

Generating PDFs Locally

Requires Pandoc with XeLaTeX and the Eisvogel template:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/data" pandoc/extra:latest \
  docs/markdown/conceptual-design.md -o docs/pdf/conceptual-design.pdf \
  --template eisvogel --pdf-engine=xelatex --toc --toc-depth=3 --number-sections \
  --metadata-file=docs/markdown/metadata/design.yaml

PDFs are also generated automatically by CI on every push to main and committed back to the repo.