vSphere with Tanzu – Secure TKC login with Pinniped Preview

Following on from last week’s preview of multi-AZ in vSphere with Tanzu available in vSphere 8.0, I now turn my attention to another great feature. In this post, I will preview the new Pinniped integration to provide an easy and secure login to Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. I’ve discussed Pinniped a number of times on this site, but those previous posts relate to standalone TKG clusters (often referred to as TKGm). However, with vSphere 8.0, vSphere with Tanzu also has Pinniped integration. In a nutshell, vSphere Administrators can now federate an external Identity Provider (IDP) with the Supervisor cluster. This means…

Securing LDAP with TLS certificates using ClusterIssuer in TKG v1.4

Over the last month or so, I have looked at various ways of securing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters. One recent post covered the integration of LDAP through Dex and Pinniped so you can control who can access the the non-admin context of your TKG cluster. I’ve also looked at how TKG clusters that do not have direct access to the internet can use a HTTP/HTTPS proxy. Similarly,  I looked at some tips when deploying TKG in an air-gapped environment, pulling all the necessary images from our external image registry and pushing them to a local Harbor registry. In another…

Securing application Ingress access on TKG v1.4 with Cert Manager and Contour

In this article, I will walk through the steps involved in securing application Ingress access on TKG v1.4. To achieve this, I will use 2 packages that are available with TKG v1.4, Cert Manager and Contour. We will deploy a sample application kuard – Kubernetes Up and Running demo, and show how we can use these packages to automatically generated certificates to establish trust between our client (browser) and the application (kuard) which will be accessed via an Ingress. For the purposes of this article, I will create my own local Certificate Authority. If you have access to a valid…

A closer look at vSphere with Kubernetes Permissions

In many of my recent posts about vSphere with Kubernetes, I use a single user (administrator@vsphere.local) to do all of my work. This allows me to carry out a range of activities without worrying about permissions. This vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) administrator has “edit” permissions on all of the vK8s namespaces. In this post, I want to look at how to assign some different vSphere SSO users and permissions to different namespaces, and also how these permissions are implemented in the vK8s platform (through the Kubernetes ClusterRole and RoleBinding constructs). Let’s start with a view of what a namespace looks…

vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and encryption support

A common request we’ve had for the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver is to support encryption of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes using the vSphere feature called VMcrypt. Although we’ve had VM encryption since vSphere 6.5, this was a feature that we could not support in the first version of the CSI driver that we shipped with vSphere 6.7U3. However, I’m pleased to announce that we can now support this feature with the new CSI driver shipping with vSphere 7.0. The reason we can support it in vSphere 7.0 is that First Class Disks, also known as Improved Virtual Disks, now…

New steps to use HyTrust KMIP with vSAN Encryption

I’m back in the lab this week, looking at some of the newer features around vSAN. As part of this, I needed vSAN Encryption enabled, so I downloaded the latest HyTrust KeyControl appliance as this has an easy to use KMIP Server. This new version is 4.2.1,  and it has a few new steps compared to the previous versions I used, which were a little confusing to begin with. First I deployed the OVA, supplied the password, logged into the web interface, and enabled KMIP as before. However, that is where things are now a little different to before.

A closer look at VMware’s latest Cloud Launch

Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…