I have been spending a lot of time recently on vSphere with Tanzu and NSX-T. One of the tasks that I want to do is perform a network trace from a pod running on a TKG worker node. This will be for a future post. However, before running the trace, I need to secure shell (ssh) onto a TKG worker node in order to run the traceroute. This is more challenging with NSX-T compared to using vSphere networking. The reason why is because NSX-T provides “internal” network segments for the nodes which sit behind a tier-1 and tier-0 gateway. To…
In my most recent posts, the steps to get NSX-T to a point where it is ready for vSphere with Tanzu are examined. A three-part blog series describes the NSX-T setup process for vSphere with Tanzu – see part 1, part 2, and part 3. In this post, we will take a look ‘under the covers’. I will look at the network objects and services that vSphere with Tanzu automatically builds in NSX-T. As per these previous configuration steps, a number of NSX-T system objects are setup, such as Compute Manager and Edge Cluster. Some network objects must also be…
I created a few short videos to show the integration between Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) and vSphere with Tanzu. In the first demonstration, I show the steps involved in registering the vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control. Basically, it involves retrieving a manifest from TMC, and deploying it to the Supervisor. In the second demo, I show how Tanzu Mission Control can be used to easily deploy Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) workload clusters to vSphere with Tanzu once the Supervisor Cluster has been registered. Of course, once TMC is managing your cluster, all sorts of additional features are…
The steps to deploy NSX-T Manager, create a Compute Manager and configuring NSX on the ESXi hosts were described in part 1 of this series of posts. The steps to create an NSX-T Edge cluster were outlined in part 2. In this part 3 post, we will look at the final step in preparing an NSX-T environment for vSphere with Tanzu, and that is the creation and configuring of a tier-0 gateway. Networks that are created for Kubernetes workloads in vSphere with Tanzu will connect to this tier-0 gateway and subsequently allow external connectivity to the TKG clusters, e.g. developers…
In part 1 of 3, the steps on how to add vCenter server as the NSX Compute Manager and how to configure the ESXi hosts as host transport nodes were completed. In this part 2 of the series, the creation of an NSX Edge cluster is described. Once again, the end goal of this post is to have an NSX-T configuration that can be leveraged by vSphere with Tanzu. When this part is complete, the overlay network should extend to include the Edge nodes for east-west traffic. The Edge nodes will also be configured to have uplinks to allow for…
It is quite some time since I looked at deploying NSX-T, VMware’s unified networking platform. The reason for this is that VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, takes care of the deployment and configuration of NSX-T automatically through the SDDC Manager. However, I wanted to revisit it and do it the hard way, just to re-educate myself on the steps involved. The goal is to have an NSX-T configuration that can be leveraged by vSphere with Tanzu. Since this is rather a lengthy process, I will divide it up into 3 separate posts. The first will focus on the configuration ESXi hosts…
In this post, we are going to build on the work already done when we deployed Carvel packages on a Tanzu Kubernetes workload cluster created by the TKG Service in vSphere with Tanzu. We saw in that post what the requirements are, how to use the tanzu command line to set context to a workload cluster, add the TKG v1.4 package repository. We also saw how to use the tanzu CLI to deploy our first package, which was cert manager. We will now continue with the deployment of a number of other packages, such as Contour (for Ingress), External-DNS (to…