In my Getting Started with vSphere with Tanzu blog post yesterday, we discussed the differences between vSphere with Tanzu and VCF with Tanzu. We also called out the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu. In this post, we will proceed to the next step and deploy the HA-Proxy appliance, which will provide Load Balancer functionality on behalf of the Supervisor cluster and the TKG clusters. Let’s start with a look at my simple networking configuration. This is how my lab environment looks at present. I have created a vSphere distributed switch and created 3 distributed portgroups. The management network is on…
With the release of vSphere 7.0U1, vSphere with Kubernetes has been decoupled from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VMware now has two vSphere with Kubernetes offerings, the original VCF based vSphere with Kubernetes offering, now referred to as VCF with Tanzu, and a newer offering outside of VCF, referred to as vSphere with Tanzu. This write-up is to step through the deployment of the new vSphere with Tanzu with HA-Proxy. I won’t cover everything in this single post, but will do a series of 4 posts stepping through the process. Differences: VCF with Tanzu and vSphere with Tanzu I thought it…
In this post, we will look at what is in the new release of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes, as well as enhancements to Cloud Native Storage (CNS) that handles CSI request on the vSphere infrastructure. CSI improvements will be available in version 2.1 of the driver, and the CNS components will be part of vSphere 7.0U1. Both are required for the features discussed here. The main objective of this release is two-fold: (a) to add CNS-CSI features to vSphere with Kubernetes so that it has a similar specification to the CNS-CSI features that are available with vanilla Kubernetes,…
I recently took a look at the container integration features in VMware Fusion v11.5.6 through the vctl command line feature. I was intrigued to read about a future feature coming in version 12, which included some Kind integration. For those of you unfamiliar with Kind, it is a way of deploying Kubernetes in containers. It might sound a bit strange, but it is actually very powerful, and is used by a lot of developers for many different use-cases. This post is going to look at vctl with this new Kind integration in VMware Fusion version 12. Let’s see how to…
After recently presenting on the topic of the vSphere CSI driver, I received feedback from a number of different people that the current install mechanism is a little long-winder and prone to error. The request was for a Helm Chart to make things a little easier. I spoke to a few people about this internally, and while we have some long term plans to make this process easier, we didn’t have any plans in the short term. At that point, I reached out to my colleague and good pal, Myles Gray, and we decided we would try to create our…
I added a few enhancements to vTopology recently, notably the ability to display the details about the version and status of the vSphere CSI driver that is being used in a Kubernetes (K8s) deployment. I tested this on native K8s, vSphere with Tanzu TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) guest clusters, standalone TKG clusters as well as TKGI (formerly Enterprise PKS). Using the -csi option, you can now get details regarding the image versions, and also checks on the ready state of the CSI controller and CSI nodes. This is the example take from a standalone TKG deployment. simply ensure that your…
In this video, we look at how to create a Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with the VM Encryption feature which can be used with vSphere CSI/CNS to create a Kubernetes Storage Class that encrypts Persistent Volumes. This feature is only available with the CSI 2.0 driver for native, upstream Kubernetes deployed on vSphere 7.0 (at the time of writing). You will also need to have a Key Management Server available to the vSphere host to create a policy that allows encryption. Finally, encrypted Persistent Volumes can only be attached to encrypted virtual machines, meaning that at least one of…