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Install Gloo Mesh

Use Helm to customize your setup of Gloo Mesh Enterprise in multiple clusters.

In a multicluster setup, you install the Gloo Mesh control plane and data plane in separate clusters.

Gloo Mesh control plane: When you install the Gloo Mesh control plane in a dedicated management cluster, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server is created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations.
Data plane: Set up one or more workload clusters that are registered with and managed by the Gloo Mesh control plane in the management cluster. A deployment named gloo-mesh-agent is created to run the Gloo agent in each workload cluster. Additionally, you use the Gloo Mesh control plane to install an Istio service mesh in each workload cluster, as part of the Istio lifecycle management. By using Gloo-managed installations, you no longer need to manually install and manage the istiod control plane and gateways in each workload cluster. Instead, you provide the Istio configuration in your gloo-platform Helm chart, and Gloo translates this configuration into managed istiod control plane and gateways in the clusters.

Before you begin

Create or use existing Kubernetes clusters. For a multicluster setup, you need at least two clusters. One cluster is set up as the Gloo Mesh control plane where the management components are installed. The other cluster is registered as your data plane and runs your Kubernetes workloads and Istio service mesh. You can optionally add more workload clusters to your setup. The instructions in this guide assume one management cluster and two workload clusters. Note: The cluster name must be alphanumeric with no special characters except a hyphen (-), lowercase, and begin with a letter (not a number).
Set the names of your clusters from your infrastructure provider. If your clusters have different names, specify those names instead.
```
export MGMT_CLUSTER=mgmt
export REMOTE_CLUSTER1=cluster1
export REMOTE_CLUSTER2=cluster2
```
Save the kubeconfig contexts for your clusters. Run kubectl config get-contexts, look for your cluster in the CLUSTER column, and get the context name in the NAME column. Note: Do not use context names with underscores. The context name is used as a SAN specification in the generated certificate that connects workload clusters to the management cluster, and underscores in SAN are not FQDN compliant. You can rename a context by running kubectl config rename-context "<oldcontext>" <newcontext>.
```
export MGMT_CONTEXT=<management-cluster-context>
export REMOTE_CONTEXT1=<remote-cluster1-context>
export REMOTE_CONTEXT2=<remote-cluster2-context>
   
```
Add your Gloo Mesh Enterprise license that you got from your Solo account representative. If you do not have a key yet, you can get a trial license by contacting an account representative. If you prefer to specify license keys in a secret instead, see Licensing.
```
export GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY=<license_key>
```
Set the Gloo Mesh Enterprise version. The latest version is used as an example. You can find other versions in the Changelog documentation. Append ‘-fips’ for a FIPS-compliant image, such as ‘2.3.4-fips’. Do not include v before the version number.
Gloo Platform version 2.3.4 is not compatible with previous 1.x releases and custom resources such as VirtualMesh or TrafficPolicy.
```
export GLOO_VERSION=2.3.4
```
Install the following CLI tools:
- kubectl, the Kubernetes command line tool. Download the kubectl version that is within one minor version of the Kubernetes clusters you plan to use.
- meshctl, the Gloo command line tool for bootstrapping Gloo Platform, registering clusters, describing configured resources, and more. Be sure to download version 2.3.4, which uses the latest Gloo Mesh CRDs.
- helm, the Kubernetes package manager.
Production installations: Review Best practices for production to prepare your optional security measures. For example, before you begin your Gloo installation, you can provide your own certificates and set up secure access to the Gloo UI.

Install the control plane

Customize your Gloo Mesh setup by installing with the Gloo Platform Helm chart.

This guide uses the new gloo-platform Helm chart, which is available in Gloo Platform 2.3 and later. For more information about this chart, see the gloo-platform chart overview guide.

Add and update the Helm repository for Gloo Platform.

helm repo add gloo-platform https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-charts
helm repo update

Apply the Gloo Platform CRDs to your cluster by creating a gloo-platform-crds Helm release.

helm install gloo-platform-crds gloo-platform/gloo-platform-crds \
   --kube-context $MGMT_CONTEXT \
   --namespace=gloo-mesh \
   --create-namespace \
   --version $GLOO_VERSION

Prepare a Helm values file for production-level settings, including FIPS-compliant images, OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI, and more. To get started, you can use the minimum settings in the mgmt-server.yaml profile as a basis for your values file. This profile enables all of the necessary components that are required for a Gloo Mesh control plane installation, such as the management server, as well as some optional components, such as the Gloo UI.
```
curl https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-profiles/$GLOO_VERSION/mgmt-server.yaml > mgmt-server.yaml
open mgmt-server.yaml
```

Edit the file to provide your own details for settings that are recommended for production deployments, such as the following optional settings.

Field	Decription
`glooMgmtServer.relay`	Secure the relay connection between the Gloo management server and agents. By default, Gloo Mesh generates self-signed certificates and keys for the root CA and uses these credentials to derive the intermediate CA, server and client TLS certificates. This setup is not recommended for production. Instead, use your preferred PKI provider to generate and store your credentials, and to have more control over the certificate management process. For more information, see the relay Setup options.
`glooMgmtServer.resources.limits`	Add resource limits for the `gloo-mesh-mgmt-server` pod, such as `cpu: 1000m` and `memory: 1Gi`.
`glooMgmtServer.serviceOverrides.metadata.annotations`	Add annotations for the management server load balancer as needed, such as AWS-specific load balancer annotations. For more information, see Deployment and service overrides.
`glooUi.auth`	Set up OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI. For more information, see UI authentication.
`istioInstallations`	Add an `istioInstallations` section to deploy managed Istio service meshes to each workload cluster. For an example of how this section might look, expand “Example: istioInstallations section” after this table.
`prometheus.enabled`	Disable the default Prometheus instance as needed to provide your own. Otherwise, you can keep the default Prometheus server enabled, and deploy a production-level server to scrape metrics from the server. For more information on each option, see Best practices for collecting metrics in production.
`redis`	Disable the default Redis deployment and provide your own backing database as needed. For more information, see Backing databases.

Example: istioInstallations section

For more information about the settings you can configure:

See Best practices for production.
See all possible fields for the Helm chart by running helm show values gloo-platform/gloo-platform --version v2.3.4 > all-values.yaml. You can also see these fields in the Helm values documentation.

Install the Gloo Mesh control plane in your management cluster, including the customizations in your Helm values file.

helm install gloo-platform gloo-platform/gloo-platform \
   --kube-context $MGMT_CONTEXT \
   --namespace gloo-mesh \
   --version $GLOO_VERSION \
   --values mgmt-server.yaml \
   --set common.cluster=$MGMT_CLUSTER \
   --set licensing.glooMeshLicenseKey=$GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY

Verify that the control plane pods have a status of Running.

kubectl get pods -n gloo-mesh --context $MGMT_CONTEXT

Example output:

NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-56c495796b-cx687    1/1     Running   0          30s
gloo-mesh-redis-8455d49c86-f8qhw          1/1     Running   0          30s
gloo-mesh-ui-65b6b6df5f-bf4vp             3/3     Running   0          30s
gloo-telemetry-collector-agent-fcc82      1/1     Running   0          30s
gloo-telemetry-collector-agent-npnjn      1/1     Running   0          30s
gloo-telemetry-collector-agent-p8jwj      1/1     Running   0          30s
gloo-telemetry-gateway-6547f479d5-r4zm6   1/1     Running   0          30s
prometheus-server-57cd8c74d4-2bc7f        2/2     Running   0          30s

Save the external address and port that were assigned by your cloud provider to the gloo-mesh-mgmt-server load balancer service. The gloo-mesh-agent relay agent in each cluster accesses this address via a secure connection.

LoadBalancer IP address
EKS: LoadBalancer hostname


   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_DOMAIN=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh gloo-mesh-mgmt-server --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_PORT=$(kubectl -n gloo-mesh get service gloo-mesh-mgmt-server --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[?(@.name=="grpc")].port}')
   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_ADDRESS=${MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_DOMAIN}:${MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_PORT}
   echo $MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_ADDRESS


   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_DOMAIN=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh gloo-mesh-mgmt-server --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}')
   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_PORT=$(kubectl -n gloo-mesh get service gloo-mesh-mgmt-server --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[?(@.name=="grpc")].port}')
   MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_ADDRESS=${MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_DOMAIN}:${MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_PORT}
   echo $MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_ADDRESS

Save the external address and port that were assigned by your cloud provider to the Gloo OpenTelemetry (OTel) gateway load balancer service. The OTel collector agents in each workload cluster send metrics to this addess.

export TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh gloo-telemetry-gateway --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
export TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_PORT=$(kubectl -n gloo-mesh get service gloo-telemetry-gateway --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[?(@.name=="otlp")].port}')
export TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_ADDRESS=${TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_IP}:${TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_PORT}
echo $TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_ADDRESS

Create a workspace that selects all clusters and namespaces by default. Gloo workspaces let you organize team resources across Kubernetes namespaces and clusters. In this example, you create a single workspace for everything. For more complex setups, such as creating a workspace for each team to enforce service isolation, set up federation, and even share resources by importing and exporting, see Organize team resources with workspaces.
```
kubectl apply --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: Workspace
metadata:
 name: $MGMT_CLUSTER
 namespace: gloo-mesh
spec:
 workloadClusters:
   - name: '*'
     namespaces:
       - name: '*'
EOF
```

Create a workspace settings for the workspace that enables federation across clusters and selects the Istio east-west gateway.

kubectl apply --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: WorkspaceSettings
metadata:
 name: $MGMT_CLUSTER
 namespace: gloo-mesh
spec:
 options:
   serviceIsolation:
     enabled: false
   federation:
     enabled: false
     serviceSelector:
     - {}
   eastWestGateways:
   - selector:
       labels:
         istio: eastwestgateway
EOF

Register workload clusters

For the workload cluster that you want to register with Gloo, set the following environment variables. You update these variables each time you register another workload cluster.
```
export REMOTE_CLUSTER=$REMOTE_CLUSTER1
export REMOTE_CONTEXT=$REMOTE_CONTEXT1
```
Create a KubernetesCluster resource in the management cluster to represent the workload cluster and store relevant data, such as the workload cluster's local domain.
- The metadata.name must match the name of the workload cluster that you specify in the gloo-platform Helm chart in subsequent steps.
- The spec.clusterDomain must match the local cluster domain of the Kubernetes cluster.
- You can optionally give your cluster a label, such as env: prod, region: us-east, or another selector. Your workspaces can use the label to automatically add the cluster to the workspace.
```
kubectl apply --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: KubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: ${REMOTE_CLUSTER}
  namespace: gloo-mesh
  labels:
    env: prod
spec:
  clusterDomain: cluster.local
EOF
```

Apply the Gloo Platform CRDs to your cluster by creating a gloo-platform-crds Helm release.

helm install gloo-platform-crds gloo-platform/gloo-platform-crds \
   --kube-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT \
   --namespace=gloo-mesh \
   --create-namespace \
   --version $GLOO_VERSION

Prepare a Helm values file for production-level settings, including FIPS-compliant images, OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI, and more. To get started, you can use the minimum settings in the agent.yaml profile as a basis for your values file. This profile enables the Gloo agent and the Gloo Platform telemetry collector.
```
curl https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-profiles/$GLOO_VERSION/agent.yaml > agent.yaml
open agent.yaml
```

Edit the file to provide your own details for settings that are recommended for production deployments, such as the following optional settings.

Field	Decription
`glooAgent.relay`	Provide the certificate and secret details that correspond to your management server relay settings. For more information, see the relay Setup options.
`glooAgent.resources.limits`	Add resource limits for the `gloo-mesh-mgmt-server` pod, such as `cpu: 500m` and `memory: 512Mi`.

For more information about the settings you can configure:

See Best practices for production.
See all possible fields for the Helm chart by running helm show values gloo-platform/gloo-platform --version v2.3.4 > all-values.yaml. You can also see these fields in the Helm values documentation.

Deploy the relay agent to the workload cluster.

helm install gloo-platform gloo-platform/gloo-platform \
   --namespace gloo-mesh \
   --kube-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT \
   --version $GLOO_VERSION \
   --values agent.yaml \
   --set common.cluster=$REMOTE_CLUSTER \
   --set glooAgent.relay.serverAddress=$MGMT_SERVER_NETWORKING_ADDRESS \
   --set telemetryCollector.config.exporters.otlp.endpoint=$TELEMETRY_GATEWAY_ADDRESS

Optional: Install add-ons, such as the external auth and rate limit servers, in a separate Helm release. Only create this release if you did not enable the extAuthService and rateLimiter in your main installation release.

export ISTIO_REVISION=1-17
kubectl create namespace gloo-mesh-addons
kubectl label namespace gloo-mesh-addons istio.io/rev="${ISTIO_REVISION}" --overwrite
helm install gloo-agent-addons gloo-platform/gloo-platform \
   --namespace gloo-mesh-addons \
   --create-namespace \
   --version $GLOO_VERSION \
   --set common.cluster=$REMOTE_CLUSTER \
   --set extAuthService.enabled=true \
   --set rateLimiter.enabled=true

Verify that the Gloo data plane components are healthy. If not, try debugging the agent.

meshctl check --kubecontext $REMOTE_CONTEXT

Example output:

🟢 CRD Version check


🟢 Gloo Platform Deployment Status

Namespace        | Name             | Ready | Status 
gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-agent  | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh-addons | ext-auth-service | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh-addons | rate-limiter     | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh-addons | redis            | 1/1   | Healthy

Repeat steps 1 - 8 to register each workload cluster with Gloo.

Verify that your Gloo Mesh setup is correctly installed. If not, try debugging the relay connection. Note that this check might take a few seconds to verify that:

Your Gloo Platform product licenses are valid and current.
The Gloo Platform CRDs are installed at the correct version.
The control plane pods in the management cluster are running and healthy.
The agents in the workload clusters are successfully identified by the control plane.

meshctl check --kubecontext $MGMT_CONTEXT

Example output:

🟢 License status

INFO  gloo-mesh enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 23 10:38 CDT
INFO  No GraphQL license module found for any product

🟢 CRD version check

🟢 Gloo Platform deployment status

Namespace | Name                           | Ready | Status
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-mgmt-server          | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-redis                | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-ui                   | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-telemetry-gateway         | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | prometheus-server              | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-telemetry-collector-agent | 3/3   | Healthy

🟢 Mgmt server connectivity to workload agents

Cluster  | Registered | Connected Pod                                   
cluster1 | true       | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-65bd557b95-v8qq6
cluster2 | true       | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-65bd557b95-v8qq6

If you set istioInstallations.enabled to false in your management cluster Helm installation, deploy Istio in each workload cluster.
- To deploy managed Istio installations, see Install Istio by using the Istio Lifecycle Manager.
- To instead manage Istio yourself, see Manually deploy Istio.

Optional: Configure the locality labels for the nodes

Gloo Mesh uses Kubernetes labels on the nodes in your clusters to indicate locality for the services that run on the nodes. For more information, see the Kubernetes topology and Istio locality documentation.

Cloud: Typically, your cloud provider sets the Kubernetes region and zone labels for each node automatically. Depending on the level of availability that you want, you might have clusters in the same region, but different zones. Or, each cluster might be in a different region, with nodes spread across zones.
On-premises: Depending on how you set up your cluster, you likely must set the region and zone labels for each node yourself. Additionally, consider setting a subzone label to specify nodes on the same rack or other more granular setups.

Verify that your nodes have locality labels

Verify that your nodes have at least region and zone labels. If so, and you do not want to update the labels, you can skip the remaining steps.

kubectl get nodes --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 -o jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.labels}'
kubectl get nodes --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 -o jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.labels}'

Example output with region and zone labels:

..."topology.kubernetes.io/region":"us-east","topology.kubernetes.io/zone":"us-east-2"

Add locality labels to your nodes

If your nodes do not already have region and zone labels, you must add the labels. Depending on your cluster setup, you might add the same region label to each node, but a separate zone label per node. The values are not validated against your underlying infrastructure provider. The following example shows how you might label multizone clusters in two different regions, but you can adapt the steps for your actual setup.

Label all the nodes in each cluster for the region. If your nodes have incorrect region labels, include the --overwrite flag in the command.

kubectl label nodes --all --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 topology.kubernetes.io/region=us-east
kubectl label nodes --all --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 topology.kubernetes.io/region=us-west

List the nodes in each cluster. Note the name for each node.

kubectl get nodes --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1
kubectl get nodes --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2

Label each node in each cluster for the zone. If your nodes have incorrect zone labels, include the --overwrite flag in the command.

kubectl label node <cluster1_node-1> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-east-1
kubectl label node <cluster1_node-2> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-east-2
kubectl label node <cluster1_node-3> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-east-3

kubectl label node <cluster2_node-1> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-west-1
kubectl label node <cluster2_node-2> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-west-2
kubectl label node <cluster2_node-3> --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-west-3

Next steps

Now that the Gloo Mesh is installed, check out the following resources to explore Gloo Mesh capabilities:

Organize team resources with workspaces.
Deploy sample apps for multicluster or single cluster environments to follow the guides in the documentation.
Review how Gloo Mesh custom resources are automatically translated into Istio resources.
Talk to an expert to get advice or build out a proof of concept.
Join the #gloo-mesh channel in the Solo.io community slack.
Try out one of the Gloo Mesh workshops.