On March 10th 2020, we saw a plethora of VMware announcements around vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and of course the Tanzu portfolio. The majority of these announcements tie in very deeply with the overall VMware company vision which is any application on any cloud on any device. Those applications have traditionally been virtualized applications. Now we are turning our attention to newer, modern applications which are predominantly container based, and predominantly run on Kubernetes. Our aim is to build a platform which can build, run, manage, connect and protect both traditional virtualized applications and modern containerized…
I recently wanted to deploy a newer versions of Kubernetes to see it working with our Cloud Native Storage (CNS) feature. Having assisted with the original landing pages for CPI and CSI, I’d done this a few times in the past. However, the deployment tutorial that we used back then was based on Kubernetes version 1.14.2. I wanted to go with a more recent build of K8s, e.g. 1.16.3. By the way, if you are unclear about the purposes of the CPI and CSI, you can learn more about them on the landing page, here for CPI and here for…
With Enterprise PKS deployed in a Workload Domain in VMware Cloud Foundation, we now come to the point where we can begin to create Kubernetes clusters and deploy some containerized applications. We need access to some tooling to achieve this. One option is to SSH onto the Operations Manager appliance, as it has many of the necessary tools already installed. However, I prefer to do this in my own management/jump desktop rather than use components that are part of the actual product. In this post, I will show you the steps to get setup with the required tool-set, deploy your…
We are nearing the end of our journey with Getting Started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). In this post, we will go through the deployment of Enterprise PKS v1.5 on a Workload Domain created in VCF v3.9. We’ve been through a number of steps to get to this point, all of which can be found here. Now we have some of the major prerequisites in place, notably NSX-T Edge networking and PKS Certificates, so we can proceed with the Enterprise PKS deployment. However, there are still a few additional prerequisites needed before we can start. Let’s review those first of…
I think now is a good time to take a recap on what we have built so far with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). We’ve done a number of activities to date, notably the deployment of the management domain in part 1. Then we spend some time deploying the vRealize Suite of products in parts 2, 3 and 4. In part 5, we commissioned some additional ESXi hosts and then most recently we created our first workload domain in part 6, which included the deployment of NSX-T 2.5. Now we come to quite a long section, which is the deployment of…
As I got more and more familiar with running Kubernetes on top of vSphere, I came to the realization that it might be useful to be able to query the vSphere Infrastructure from Kubernetes, particularly via kubectl. For example, I might like to know some of the details about the master nodes and worker nodes (e.g. which ESXi host are they on?, how much resources are they consuming?). Also, if I have a persistent volume, how can I query which vSphere datastore is it on, which policy is it using, what is the path to the VMDK? Therefore I started…
After being asked about how vSphere Host Groups worked with Availability Zones in Enterprise PKS earlier this week, I decided to spend a little time setting it up in my lab and doing some testing to make sure I could understand the feature and its behaviour. Essentially what this feature allows you to do is to make use of the vSphere Host Group feature to group a bunch of ESXi hosts together. Then as one builds Availability Zones (commonly referred to AZs) in Enterprise PKS, a Host Group can be associated with an AZ. Anything that Enterprise PKS deploys to…