It’s been some time since I looked at how to use the Velero CLI to backup and restore some modern applications running in a Kubernetes cluster. However, after publishing how to use the new VKS Manager (VKSM) Data Protection (DP) earlier this week, it was mentioned that many customers who are on their VCF 9.x journey and who are using the Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service to deploy VKS clusters, have not yet deployed VCF Automation into their VCF stack. This means that they do not have VKSM DP available to them just yet. So the question was whether or…
I have been spending some time looking at the new Volume Service in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. Through VCF Automation, is is possible for tenants of VCF to provision their own volumes. These volumes can be consumed by the VM Service, something that has been a part of the Supervisor Services for many years. However, it is also possible for workloads running in VKS, the vSphere Kubernetes Service, to consume the static volumes provisioned via the Volume Service. In this post, I will show you the steps to create a static volume via the Volume Service, and then create…
Security is top of mind for most, if not all, of our customers these days. Many years ago, I wrote a blog post on how customers could encrypt Kubernetes Persistent Volumes with an external Key Provider. One of our customers recently reached out to me to ask if we had any plans to provide similar support with the Native Key Provider. As my focus has been in other areas recently, I reached out to our CSI engineering team for an update. I then found out that support was added in our most recent release, vSphere 8.0U3. While no changes we…
In this series of posts, we saw in part 1 how to setup Aria Automation version 8.17. This is required for Cloud Consumption Interface support. In part 2, we saw how to enable the Cloud Consumption interface (CCI) in the Supervisor of vSphere with Tanzu. However, even though CCI is now deployed as a Supervisor Service, it is not yet completely configured to work with Aria Automation. Thus, it is still not yet possible for an Aria Automation user to interact with the Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu to create TKG clusters or VMs using the VM Service. This is…
In the part 1 blog post, we discussed how to setup Aria Automation version 8.17 so that it could be used with Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) to provision databases using Data Services Manager. In this post, we will look at the steps to integrate Aria Automation with CCI. There is a dependency here on vSphere 8.0U2 and vSphere with Tanzu, which we will assume has already been deployed. Thus, the main task at this point is to setup and enable the CCI Service on the Supervisor Cluster of vSphere with Tanzu. (Although I haven’t done a blog post of vSphere…
One of the common asks we get from customers on Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0 is the following: “I already run Kubernetes. Is it possible to create databases from my existing Kubernetes clusters using DSM?”. The answer is Yes. We provide a piece of software called the DSM Consumption Operator. This installs on your local Kubernetes (K8s) cluster and allows admins or developers to request the creation of databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL). On receipt of this request, DSM provisions its own K8s cluster, and then provisions the database on top. Your admins or developers can then connect to the database and…
I’ve seen a number of queries around the behaviour of vSphere with Tanzu when it comes to querying Kubernetes objects on the Supervisor Cluster. More often than not, it is a question which arises when a user get an error similar to the following: Error from server (Forbidden): wcpnamespaces.appplatform.wcp.vmware.com is forbidden: \ User “sso:Administrator@vsphere.local” cannot list resource “wcpnamespaces” in API group \ “appplatform.wcp.vmware.com” in the namespace “cormac-ns” The reason for these errors is because the Supervisor Cluster is not treated as a general purpose Kubernetes cluster. The predominant role of the Supervisor Cluster is to provide services, such as the…