In my earlier overview of vSphere 8 announcements at VMware Explore 2022, I highlight a number of new products and features. One of the most significant announcements is vSphere Distributed Services Engine, formerly known as Project Monterey. As mentioned in the post, this enhancement gives us the ability to offload tasks to a Data Processing Unit (DPU aka SmartNIC). These tasks have historically been done by x86 CPUs on the hypervisor. Now these tasks are offloading to the DPU. And the programmable hardware accelerator on the DPU is also leveraged to boost overall performance. The first wave of innovation around…
Following on from last week’s preview of multi-AZ in vSphere with Tanzu available in vSphere 8.0, I now turn my attention to another great feature. In this post, I will preview the new Pinniped integration to provide an easy and secure login to Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. I’ve discussed Pinniped a number of times on this site, but those previous posts relate to standalone TKG clusters (often referred to as TKGm). However, with vSphere 8.0, vSphere with Tanzu also has Pinniped integration. In a nutshell, vSphere Administrators can now federate an external Identity Provider (IDP) with the Supervisor cluster. This means…
One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere infrastructures. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on those clusters. My colleagues, Jose Manzaneque and Alexander Ullah do a great job explaining…
I was looking for a way to migrate VMkernel adapters back from a VDS to a VSS. This was because I am testing various upcoming releases of vCenter Server 8.0 and vSphere with Tanzu. vSphere with Tanzu, if you do not use NSX-T, requires a distributed switch and distributed portgroups. After building out some test environments, I wanted to roll back a distributed switch (VDS) configuration to a standard vSwitch (VSS) configuration. The process seems to have changed a few times in the past, and I could not find anything that demonstrated how to do task on vSphere 7.0. Thus…
It is a long time since I wrote a post like this. However, I am thrilled to announce that I am back presenting at the VMware User Group conferences again this autumn. In October, I have been invited to speak at no fewer than four VMUG meetings around Europe. Without further ado, this is where you can hear me talk about some of our recent VMware Explore 2022 announcements regarding vSphere 8.0 and vSAN 8.0, vSphere+ and vSAN+, as well as Kubernetes on vSphere, and my thoughts around the vSphere Administrators journey towards managing Kubernetes platforms. I am delighted to…
VMware Explore 2022 kicked off this week. There are of course many announcements taking place across the whole suite of VMware products. In this post, I will focus primarily on the announcements related to the products that I work with on a regular basis. Those products are vSphere 8, vSphere Tanzu Standard (vSphere with Tanzu), and vSAN 8. vSphere 8 In the vSphere 8 space, the most significant announcement in my opinion is the fact that we are delivering on Project Monterey. We got our first technical preview of Project Monterey back in 2020 by the VMware CTO, Kit Colbert.…
Many readers with an interest in Kubernetes, and particularly Tanzu, will be well aware that there is no embedded Load Balancer service provider available in vSphere. Instead, the Load Balancer service needs to be provided through an external source. VMware supports a number of different mechanisms to provide such a service for Tanzu. One of the more popular providers is the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, formerly Avi Vantage. In the most recent release, version 22.1.1, some of the setup steps have changed significantly. In this post, I will highlight the setup of the new NSX ALB. Important: NSX ALB v22.1.1…