Quick Start

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This walkthrough takes you from a freshly prepared cluster to a running NVIDIA networking deployment using the SR-IOV Ethernet profile — the most common starting point. For other profiles, see the Deployment Profiles decision matrix.

Note

Use this when: you meet the Installation prerequisites, have the l8k binary on your PATH, and $KUBECONFIG set or your default kubeconfig at ~/.kube/config.

Step 1 — Discover

Probe the cluster’s network hardware. Output is written to ./cluster-config.yaml by default.

l8k discover

Discovery temporarily deploys the NIC Configuration Daemon, examines NICs and OFED-dependent kernel modules on each node, and groups nodes by PCI topology.

Step 2 — Generate

Generate Kubernetes manifests for an SR-IOV Ethernet deployment. Launch Kit auto-reads ./cluster-config.yaml and writes manifests to ./deployment/.

l8k generate --fabric ethernet --deployment-type sriov --multirail

Review deployment/.l8k/resolved-config.yaml and the generated manifests, especially node selectors, addresses, driver settings, and maintenance concurrency. See Generate Workflow for the output file layout.

Step 3 — Deploy

If the required operator CRDs are already installed, preview the reviewed bundle with a server-side dry-run:

l8k deploy --deployment-files ./deployment --dry-run

Dry-run cannot bootstrap missing CRDs. On a first installation, review the generated files and proceed with deployment, or install the compatible operator APIs before using the preview. Launch Kit manages Helm first when enabled, then policies and networking resources. Example workloads are applied only during validation:

l8k deploy --deployment-files ./deployment

Step 4 — Verify

Run validation against the same bundle and inspect its HTML report. Required checks must run on the intended workers and rails; an exit code of zero with skipped checks is incomplete evidence:

l8k validate --deployment-files ./deployment --wait 10m

See Validate Workflow for acceptance criteria and deployment/k8s-launch-kit-validation-report.html.

Next Steps

See Also