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…
As I continue to look at TKG version 1.4, I wanted to start using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrated with the Project Contour (Envoy Ingress) package. Project Contour is a control plane for the Envoy Ingress that is included with the package, but which also has the ability to dynamically change the Ingress configuration. It is included as an add-on package to TKG v1.4. To use it, I deployed a TKG management cluster and a TKG workload cluster using an NSX ALB (v 20.1.5) for the Load Balancing Service. I then proceeded to deploy the Contour package. While the…
Over the last week or so, VMware recently announced the release of TKG version 1.4. On reading through the release notes, there were a few features that caught my eye, so I thought I would deploy a cluster and take a closer look. In particular, two features were of interest. The first of these is support for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) service in workload clusters, which is available through the Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO). This is applicable when TKG is deployed on vSphere. There is also new support for the NSX ALB as a control plane endpoint provider.…
Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…
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, 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…