TKG v1.3 and the NSX Advanced Load Balancer

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…

A first look at vSphere VM Service

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…

CSI Topology – Configuration How-To

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. Please note that at the time of writing, the volume topology and availability zone feature was still in beta with vSphere…

vSphere CSI v2.2 – Online Volume Expansion

The vSphere CSI driver version 2.2 has just released. One of the features I was looking forward to in this release is the inclusion of Online Volume Expansion. While volume expansion was in earlier releases, it was always an offline operation. In other words, you have to detach the volume from the pod, grow it, and then attach it back when the expand operation completed. In this version, there is no need to remove the Pod. In this short post, I’ll show a quick demonstration of how it is done. Requirements Note: This feature requires vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (U2).…

VCP to vSphere CSI Migration in Kubernetes

When VMware first introduced support for Kubernetes, our first storage driver was the VCP, the in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider. Some might remember that this driver was referred to as Project Hatchway back in the day. This in-tree driver allows Kubernetes to consume vSphere storage for persistent volumes. One of draw-backs to the in-tree driver approach was that every storage vendor had to include their own driver in each Kubernetes distribution, which ballooned the core Kubernetes code and made maintenance difficult. Another drawback of this approach was that vendors typically had to wait for a new version of Kubernetes to release…

First steps with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

As part of the vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (U2) launch, VMware now provides another Load Balancer option for vSphere with Tanzu. This new Load Balancer, built on Avi Networks technology (and previously known as Avi Vantage), provides another production-ready load balancer option for your vSphere with Tanzu deployments. This Load Balancer, now called the NSX Advanced Load balancer, or NSX ALB for short, will provide Virtual IP addresses (VIPs) for the Supervisor Control Plane API server, the TKG (guest) clusters API server and any Kubernetes applications that require a service of type Load Balancer. In this post, I will go…

vSAN DPp – MinIO Object Store Supervisor Service [Video]

In this short video, I will demonstrate a new feature of vSphere with Tanzu, namely the vSAN Data Persistence platform. In this demo, we will show how easy it is to deploy a Supervisor Service using vSAN DPp. The service that we are deploying is MinIO, a provider of on-premises S3 Object Stores. We will see how to enable the Service, and then how to provision a dedicated S3 Object Store to a particular Namespace with vSphere with Tanzu. This means that a developer or a team of developers using a particular namespace can have their own dedicated S3 Object…