An admin workstation is the management machine used to install and operate GKE on-prem admin and user clusters. The gkeadm tool creates it, after which gkectl provisions and updates the clusters. section 17.3.3 section 5.2.1
Prepare the workstation with the following capabilities:
- Run the same Linux operating system as the cluster nodes, with Docker 19.03 or higher configured for nonroot management. section 17.3.3
- Install gcloud with anthos-auth and kubectl, and provide more than 50 GB of free disk space. section 17.3.3
- Provide L3 connectivity to every cluster node, passwordless root SSH access through private keys, and access to the control-plane VIP. section 17.3.3
- Supply vCenter credentials, a whitelisted GCP service-account key, and the vCenter certificate authority path in the generated configuration. section 5.2.1
Treat configuration credentials as an operational risk: vCenter and F5 Big-IP passwords can be written in plaintext. A wrapper around Google Cloud Secret Manager and gcloud can retrieve secrets, substitute them temporarily, apply the configuration, and remove them. section 5.2.1
gkectl check-config --kubeconfig [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] --config [CONFIG_FILE]
Validate the generated configuration before creating the load balancer and clusters with gkectl. section 5.2.1
