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 decided to dedicate a post to taking care of the Enterprise PKS prerequisites when deploying on VMware Cloud Foundation, namely the creation of the various certificates needed for trusted communication between the Enterprise PKS components (Operations Manager, BOSH, PKS and Harbor) and the rest of the environment. Unfortunately, the official VCF 3.9 documentation is a little light on the subject, simply stating that you should ‘Generate CA-Signed Certificates for Operations Manager, BOSH Director, Enterprise PKS control plane, and Harbor Registry‘. Therefore I decided that since it took me a bit of time to get these certificates setup for PKS…
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…
After spending some time watching, digesting and then writing about Project Pacific Deep Dive updates from VMworld 2019, the next item on my to-do list was to get up to speed on VMware Tanzu, or to be more specific, Tanzu Mission Control. The reason I am being more specific is that VMware Tanzu is a broad portfolio of products and features which can be categorized into 3 distinct areas. These areas are Build, Run and Manage. The Build category related to initiatives taking place in the developer space, notably with Bitnami and Pivotal, the former having recently been acquired by…
I’m sure most readers will be somewhat familiar with VMware’s Project Pacific at this point. It really is the buzz of VMworld 2019. If I had to describe Project Pacific in as few words as possible, it is a merging of vSphere and Kubernetes (K8s) with the goal of enabling our customers to deploy new, next-gen, distributed, modern applications which may be comprised of container workloads or combined container and virtual machine workloads. Not only that, we also need to provide our customers with a consistent way of managing, monitoring and securing these new modern applications. This is where Project…