Announcing VMware Tanzu and Project Pacific

Today at VMworld 2019, VMware announced the Tanzu portfolio. Essentially, Tanzu covers a suite of up and coming products and features which will allow our customers to Build, Run and Manage modern applications on Kubernetes, on vSphere. I’m pretty sure that this will not come as a major surprise, considering some of the acquisitions and intentions that VMware has announced recently. For example, we have already had the Heptio acquisition at the end of last year, then the Bitnami acquisition in May of this year, and more recently, we’ve seen the intent to acquire both Carbon Black and Pivotal. Heptio,…

Introducing vSphere Cloud Native Storage (CNS)

I’m delighted to be able to share with you that, coinciding with the release of vSphere 6.7 U3, VMware have also announced Cloud Native Storage (CNS). CNS builds on the legacy of the earlier vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) for Kubernetes, and along with a new release of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) for vSphere and Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) for vSphere, CNS aims to improve container volume management and provide deep insight into how container applications running on top of vSphere infrastructure are consuming the underlying vSphere Storage. Now, there may be a lot of unfamiliar terminology in that opening…

WaveFront Collector Issues: Error in scraping containers

I was very pleased last week, as I managed to get a bunch of metrics sent from my Kubernetes cluster into Wavefront by chaining proxies together. I was successfully able to see my cluster’s Kube-state Metrics and Kubernetes Collector Metrics in Wavefront. However, on closer inspection, I noticed that a number of the built-in Wavefront Kubernetes dashboards were not being populated (Kubernetes Metrics and Kubernetes Metrics by Namespace), and then I found a number of errors in the Wavefront collector logs in my deployment. This post will describe what these errors were, and how I rectified them. There were 2…

Setting up Velero 1.0.0 to backup K8s on vSphere/PKS

I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…

Monitoring Kubernetes with Wavefront via Proxy Chaining

Regular readers will be aware that I have been looking at various tools that will allow for the management and monitoring of Kubernetes running on vSphere. In the past, we’ve looked at the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring and vRealize Network Insight for Kubernetes. One of the other VMware products that I really wanted to try out is Wavefront. Wavefront is pretty neat as it has around 200+ pre-built integrations and dashboards. This makes it extremely easy to ingest and visualize performance data. My main issue with getting this up and running is that my Kubernetes cluster (running…

Validating Kubernetes cluster conformance with Sonobuoy

Another product added to the VMware portfolio with the acquisition of Heptio is Sonobuoy. In a nutshell, Sonobuoy will validate the state of your Kubernetes cluster by running a suite of non-destructive tests against your cluster. As part of the end-to-end (e2e) tests that are run by Sonobuoy, there is a also a subset of conformance tests run as well. These include things like best practices and interoperability tests. This will ensure that your Kubernetes cluster (whether is an upstream version or a third-party packaged version) supports all of the necessary Kubernetes APIs. You can read more about conformance here.…

Kubernetes on vSphere 101 – Ingress

As I was researching content for the 101 series, I came across the concept of an Ingress. As I hadn’t come across it before, I wanted to do a little more research on what it actually did. It seems that in some ways, they achieve the same function as a Load Balancer in so far as they provide a mean of allowing external traffic into your cluster. But they are significantly different in how they do this. If we take the Load Balancer service type first, then for every service that is exposed via a Load Balancer, a unique external…