LDAP integration with Pinniped and Dex is a topic that I have written about before, particularly with TKG v1.3. However, recently I had reason to deploy TKG v1.4 and noticed some nice new enhancements around LDAP integration that I thought it worthwhile highlighting. One is the fact that you no longer need to have a web browser available in the environment where you are configuring LDAP credentials which was a requirement is the previous version. In this post, I will deploy a TKG v1.4 management cluster on vSphere. This environment uses the NSX ALB to provide IP addresses for both…
Earlier this month, I had my first look at network policies in Tanzu Mission Control (TMC). This earlier post looked at a very simple network policy where I used a web server app, and showed how we could control access to it from other pods by using labels. In this post, I wanted to do something that is a bit more detailed. For the purposes of this test, I will use a pod based NFS server, and then control access to it from other pods who wish to mount the NFS file share from the server pod. I have already…
Some time back, I wrote a blog post about how to use the network policies available with the Antrea CNI (Container Network Interface). In that post we looked at how to create a simple network policy to prevent communication between pods in a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, based on pod selectors / labels. We stood up a simply web server and a standalone pod, and showed how the pod could access the web server when no network policies were in place. We then proceeded to create a network policy that only allowed pods to communicate to each other if the pod…
Today, we will look at another feature of Tanzu Mission Control: Data Protection. In an earlier post, we saw how Tanzu Mission Control, or TMC for short, can be used to manage and create clusters on vSphere that have Identity Management integrated with LDAP/Active Directory. We also saw how TMC managed Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on vSphere utilized the NSX ALB for Load Balancing services in that same post. Now we will deploy an S3 Object Store from MinIO to an on-premises Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. This will then become the “backup target” for TMC Data Protection. TMC Data Protection uses the…
I’ve recently been looking at some of the features around Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control (or TMC for short) is a VMware SaaS offering for managing and monitoring your Kubernetes Clusters across multiple clouds. My particular interest on this occasion was around the access policy features, especially when the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) workload clusters were deployed with LDAP/Active Directory integration via the Pinniped and Dex packages that are available with TKG. In this post, I will rollout my TKG management cluster, followed by a pair of TKG workload clusters. The TKG management cluster will be automatically integrated with…
I was recently running through the exercise of deploying Cert Manager, Contour (+ Envoy Ingress), Prometheus and Grafana packages available with TKG v1.4, just to see what steps were involved in setting up a full monitoring stack for my TKG cluster. This was a TKG deployment to vSphere, using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for Load Balancer functionality. You can read about the new enhancements around the NSX ALB and TKG v1.4 here. Honestly, it is pretty straight-forward, with some detailed documentation on the topic available here. Everything was plain sailing until I tried to deploy the Grafana package with,…
I’ve been using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for many of my experiments in the lab. Sometimes I build configurations that do not work correctly, especially around TKG. From time to time, I find that my TKG management cluster does not stand up successfully, and so I have to manually clear it down and start over. From time to time, this has left my NSX ALB with some objects that also need to be manually cleaned up. While I can delete Virtual Services and Virtual IP Addresses with ease in the NSX ALB portal/UI, I am sometimes left in a…