Kubernetes for vSphere Admins – part of the June 2023 VMware User Group Global Virtual Event series

This session was selected by the VMware User Group (VMUG) for their Global Virtual Event which was held on June 27, 2023. As part of the session, some of the fundamentals of Kubernetes (K8s) are discussed. The talk then moves onto areas where vSphere Administrators can begin to onboard with Kubernetes, particularly when K8s control plane and worker nodes are deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. The two areas which are discussed in significant detail are the external Load Balancers and the vSphere CSI driver. The talk examines the options for different Load Balancers…

vSphere with Tanzu – new TKG 2.0 ClusterClass Preview

One of the key features of the TKG 2.0 on vSphere 8 announcement at VMware Explore 2022 is the consolidation of our the Tanzu Kubernetes offerings into a single unified Kubernetes runtime. This can be considered the second edition of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. It will still come in two flavors.  One flavor is as a VM-based standalone management cluster whilst the other flavor will be Supervisor-based, integrated into vSphere with Tanzu. However, the important point is that both flavors now have the same APIs for cluster provisioning, same tooling for extension management, and the same model for release distribution.…

NSX ALB v22.1.1 – New Setup Steps

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…

Task “Delete a virtual storage object” reports “A specified parameter was not correct”

I’ve recently been looking at the vSphere Velero Plugin, and how the latest version of the plugin enables administrators to backup and restore vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster objects as well as Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster objects. This plugin utilizes vSphere snapshot technology, so that a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backed by a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere can be snapshot, and the snapshot is then moved by a Data Manager appliance to an S3 object store bucket. Once the data movement operation has completed, the snapshot is removed from the PV/FCD. During the testing of this new functionality,…

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,…

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…

A closer look at Antrea, the new CNI for vSphere with Tanzu guest clusters

I’ve spent quite a bit of time highlighting many of the new features of vSphere with Tanzu in earlier blog posts. In those posts, we saw how vSphere with Tanzu could be used to provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) guest clusters to provide a native, upstream-like, VMware supported Kubernetes. In this post, I want to delve into the guest cluster in more detail and examine the new, default Container Network Interface (CNI) called Antrea that is now shipping with the TKG guest cluster. Antrea provides networking and security services for a Kubernetes cluster. It is based on the Open vSwitch…