One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…
It is a long time since I wrote a post like this. However, I am thrilled to announce that I am back presenting at the VMware User Group conferences again this autumn. In October, I have been invited to speak at no fewer than four VMUG meetings around Europe. Without further ado, this is where you can hear me talk about some of our recent VMware Explore 2022 announcements regarding vSphere 8.0 and vSAN 8.0, vSphere+ and vSAN+, as well as Kubernetes on vSphere, and my thoughts around the vSphere Administrators journey towards managing Kubernetes platforms. I am delighted to…
Many readers with an interest in Kubernetes, and particularly Tanzu, will be well aware that there is no embedded Load Balancer service provider available in vSphere. Instead, the Load Balancer service needs to be provided through an external source. VMware supports a number of different mechanisms to provide such a service for Tanzu. One of the more popular providers is the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, formerly Avi Vantage. In the most recent release, version 22.1.1, some of the setup steps have changed significantly. In this post, I will highlight the setup of the new NSX ALB. Important: NSX ALB v22.1.1…
I’m delighted to report that my new book, Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators, is now available. It is available in both paper form and as a Kindle eBook. Links to both are provided below. The links above direct you to Amazon.com. However the book is available in other Amazon marketplaces as well. (If you can’t see the text+images above, this is a link to the paper book and this is a link to the eBook.) I hope readers of this book find it useful. I would be delighted to receive feedback and reviews on the content.
I created a few short videos to show the integration between Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) and vSphere with Tanzu. In the first demonstration, I show the steps involved in registering the vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control. Basically, it involves retrieving a manifest from TMC, and deploying it to the Supervisor. In the second demo, I show how Tanzu Mission Control can be used to easily deploy Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) workload clusters to vSphere with Tanzu once the Supervisor Cluster has been registered. Of course, once TMC is managing your cluster, all sorts of additional features are…
In this post, we are going to build on the work already done when we deployed Carvel packages on a Tanzu Kubernetes workload cluster created by the TKG Service in vSphere with Tanzu. We saw in that post what the requirements are, how to use the tanzu command line to set context to a workload cluster, add the TKG v1.4 package repository. We also saw how to use the tanzu CLI to deploy our first package, which was cert manager. We will now continue with the deployment of a number of other packages, such as Contour (for Ingress), External-DNS (to…
I’ve posted a number of articles on this site which detail how to deploy TKG v1.4 Carvel packages on the multi-cloud version of TKG, often referred to as TKGm. But did you know that these packages can also be deployed to clusters provisioned by the TKG Service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu? In this post, I will run through the steps on how to achieve this. You can find the official documentation here, which will be referred to from time to time during this post, especially for some of the manifests. It should also be noted that some of the…