Velero vSphere Operator backup/restore TKG “guest” cluster objects in vSphere with Tanzu

Over the past week or so, I have posted a number of blogs on how to get started with the new Velero vSphere Operator. I showed how to deploy the Operator in the Supervisor Cluster of vSphere with Tanzu, and also how to install the Velero and Backupdriver components in the Supervisor. We then went on to take backups and do restores of both stateless (e.g. Nginx deployment) and stateful (e.g. Cassandra StatefulSet) which were running as PodVMs is a Supervisor cluster. In the latter post, we saw how the new Velero Data Manager acted as the interface between Velero,…

vSphere with Tanzu stateful application backup/restore using Velero vSphere Operator

Recently I wrote about our new Velero vSphere Operator. This new functionality, launched with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2, enables administrators to backup and restore objects in their vSphere with Tanzu namespaces. In my previous post, I showed how we could use the Velero vSphere Operator to backup and restore a stateless application (the example used was an Nginx deployment) to and from an S3 Object Store bucket. The S3 object store and bucket was provided by the Minio Operator that is also available in VCF 4.2 as part of the vSAN Data Persistent platform (DPp) offering. In this post,…

vSphere with Tanzu backup/restore with Velero vSphere Operator

Last week, I posted about the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp), a feature that is now available with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2. In that article, I went through the setup of the Minio Operator in vSphere with Tanzu, and then we created a Minio Tenant with its own S3 Object Store. In other words, we were able to assign an on-premises S3 Object Store to a vSphere with Tanzu namespace in just a few clicks, which was pretty cool. Now, one of the other Supervisor services that is available with VCF 4.2 is the Velero vSphere Operator. Many of…

A first look at DPp (Data Persistence platform) and MinIO

Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…

VCF 4.1.0.1 Update to VCF 4.2 – Step by Step

VMware recently announced the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.2. I was particular interested in this release as it allows me to try out the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). My good pal Myles has an excellent introduction to DPp here  and I plan to create a number of posts on it going forward. My VCF 4.1.0.1 environment is what we call a Consolidated Architecture , meaning that both the management domain and workload domain run on the same infrastructure. The primary application that I run in this environment is VCF with Tanzu (vSphere with Tanzu on…

VMware Fusion 12 – vctl / KinD / MetalLB / Niginx deployment

A number of months back, I wrote an article which looked at how we now provide a Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) service in VMware Fusion 12. In a nutshell, this allows us to very quickly stand up a Kubernetes environment using the Nautilus Container Engine with a very lightweight virtual machine (CRX) based on VMware Photon OS. In this post, I wanted to extend the experience, and demonstrate how we can stand up a simple Nginx deployment. First, we will do a simple deployment.  Then we will extend it to use a Load Balancer service (leveraging MetalLB). This post will…

Using a Kubernetes Operator to query vSphere Resources

As many regular readers will be aware, I’ve spent a bit of time in the past looking at how vSphere resources are consumed by Kubernetes objects, when Kubernetes is deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. While much of this is visible in the vSphere client, I’m focused on how to see this vSphere resource consumption from within Kubernetes. If I am working in Kubernetes, I’d rather not context switch out to the vSphere client just to see how much storage is left on a datastore or how much CPU and Memory is left on…