As many regular readers will be aware, I’ve spent a bit of time in the past looking at how vSphere resources are consumed by Kubernetes objects, when Kubernetes is deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. While much of this is visible in the vSphere client, I’m focused on how to see this vSphere resource consumption from within Kubernetes. If I am working in Kubernetes, I’d rather not context switch out to the vSphere client just to see how much storage is left on a datastore or how much CPU and Memory is left on…
A common question I get in relation to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is whether or not it supports vSAN File Service, and specifically the read-write-many (RWX) feature for container volumes. To address this question, we need to make a distinction into how TKG is being provisioned. There is the multi-cloud version of TKG, which can run on vSphere, AWS or Azure, and are deployed from a TKG manager. Then there is the embedded TKG edition where ‘workload clusters’ are deployed in Namespaces via vSphere with Tanzu / VCF with Tanzu. To answer the question about whether or not TKG…
In this post, I am going to outline the steps involved to successfully deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) management cluster and workload clusters in an internet restricted environment. This is often referred to as an air-gapped environment. Note that for part of this exercise, a virtual machine will need to be connected to the internet in order to pull down the images requires for TKG. Once these have been downloaded and pushed up to our local Harbor container image registry, the internet connection can be removed and we will work in a completely air-gapped environment. Note that TKG here…
Over the thanksgiving break, I took the opportunity to look at the steps required to deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKGm) in an air-gapped or internet-restricted environment. The first step to achieving this was to deploy the Harbor Container Image Registry locally in my own environment. While I’ve written about Harbor quite a bit in the early days, I haven’t looked at it in earnest recently, so it was good to revisit it and see what changed. In this post, I’ll walk through the steps involved, and point you to few scripts that I developed to speed up the process. At…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time highlighting many of the new features of vSphere with Tanzu in earlier blog posts. In those posts, we saw how vSphere with Tanzu could be used to provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) guest clusters to provide a native, upstream-like, VMware supported Kubernetes. In this post, I want to delve into the guest cluster in more detail and examine the new, default Container Network Interface (CNI) called Antrea that is now shipping with the TKG guest cluster. Antrea provides networking and security services for a Kubernetes cluster. It is based on the Open vSwitch…
One of the new, exciting features in vSAN 7.0U1 is the extension to vSAN File Service. As well as supporting NFS v3 & v4.1, we now also support SMB (Server Message Block) protocols v2 & v3. This protocol is commonly associated with Windows File Shares. In this post, I will go through the new configuration steps, and then we shall present the new created SMB file share to a Windows desktop. One of the new prerequisites, which wasn’t needed with NFS file shares, is that Active Directory integration is required for SMB. We will see this new step during the…
I’ve spent a lot of time recently on creating and building out vSphere with Tanzu environment, with the goal of deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster. I frequently used the kubectl-vsphere command to logout of the Supervisor namespace context and login to the Guest cluster context. This allowed me to start deploying stateful and stateful apps in my Tanzu Kubernetes Guest cluster. I thought no more about this step until a recent conversation with my colleague Frank Denneman. He queried whether or not Kubernetes developers would actually have vSphere privileges to do this. It was a great question which led…