A short video demonstration on how to use the new VM Service in vSphere with Tanzu to create a virtual machine on vSphere infrastructure using some simple YAML manifests. The demo also shows how to create the user data contexts that is needed by the cloud_init customization process when the virtual machine is deployed, and needs to be configured. Further details can be found in this blog post.
Tanzu Kubernetes v1.3 introduces OIDC and LDAP identity management with Pinniped and Dex. Pinniped allows you to plug external OpenID Connect (OIDC) or LDAP identity providers (IDP) into Tanzu Kubernetes clusters which in turn allows you to control access to those clusters. Pinniped uses Dex as the endpoint to connect to your upstream LDAP identity provider, e.g. Microsoft Active Directory. If you are using OpenID Connect (OIDC), Dex is not required. It is also my understanding that eventually Pinniped with eventually integrate directly with LDAP as well, removing the need for Dex. But for the moment, both components are required.…
I recently posted about a new feature in vSphere with Tanzu called VM Service which became available with vSphere 7.0U2a. In a nutshell, this new service allows developers to provision not just Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters and PodVMs in their respective namespaces. Now they can also provision native Virtual Machines as well. The VM Service introduces a new feature called VirtualMachineClassBindings to a developer, and has also introduced some new behaviour around an existing feature, VirtualMachineClass. VirtualMachineClass describes the available resource sizing for virtual machines. They describe how much compute and memory to allocate to a VM, and also if the…
In my most recent post, we took a look at how Cluster API is utilized in TKG. Note that this post refers to the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-cloud version, sometimes referred to as TKGm. I will use this naming convention to refer to the multi-cloud TKG in this post, so that it is differentiated from other TKG products in the Tanzu portfolio. In this post, we will take a closer look at a new feature in TKG v1.3, namely the fact that it now supports the NSX ALB – Advanced Load Balancer (formerly known as AVI Vantage) – to…
In this post, I am going to take a look at Cluster API, and then take a look at some of the changes made to TKG v.1.3.1. TKG uses Cluster API extensively to create workload Kubernetes clusters, so we will be able to apply what we see from the first part of this post to TKG in the second part. There is already an extensive amount of information and documentation available on Cluster API, so I am not going to cover every aspect of it here. This link will take you to the Cluster API concepts, which discusses all the…
In this post, we will take a look at a brand new service that is now available in vSphere with Tanzu, called the vSphere VM Service. This new services enables developers to create virtual machines on vSphere Infrastructure via Kubernetes YAML manifests, just like they would create Tanzu Kubernetes clusters via the TKG service, or PodVMs via the Pod service, both of which are already available in vSphere with Tanzu. Since we feel that many applications will be made up of both containers and VMs, this is the first step in enabling developers to create these multi-faceted applications via the…
In this post, we will look at another feature of the vSphere CSI driver that enables the placement of Kubernetes objects on different vSphere environments using a combination of vSphere Tags and a feature of the CSI driver called topology or failure domains. To achieve this, some additional entries must be added to the vSphere CSI driver configuration file. The CSI driver discovers each Kubernetes node/virtual machine topology, and through the kubelet, adds them as labels to the nodes. This is what my test environment looks like: CSI Topology can be used to provide another level of availability to your…