Using Tanzu Mission Control Data Protection with on-premises S3 (MinIO)

Today, we will look at another feature of Tanzu Mission Control: Data Protection. In an earlier post, we saw how Tanzu Mission Control, or TMC for short, can be used to manage and create clusters on vSphere that have Identity Management integrated with LDAP/Active Directory. We also saw how TMC managed Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on vSphere utilized the NSX ALB for Load Balancing services in that same post. Now we will deploy an S3 Object Store from MinIO to an on-premises Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. This will then become the “backup target” for TMC Data Protection. TMC Data Protection uses the…

TKG v1.4 Prometheus + Grafana Package Deployment: package reconciliation failed

I was recently running through the exercise of deploying Cert Manager, Contour (+ Envoy Ingress), Prometheus and Grafana packages available with TKG v1.4, just to see what steps were involved in setting up a full monitoring stack for my TKG cluster. This was a TKG deployment to vSphere, using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for Load Balancer functionality. You can read about the new enhancements around the NSX ALB and TKG v1.4 here.  Honestly, it is pretty straight-forward, with some detailed documentation on the topic available here. Everything was plain sailing until I tried to deploy the Grafana package with,…

Cleaning up NSX ALB (Avi) Pool when referred to by L4PolicySet

I’ve been using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for many of my experiments in the lab. Sometimes I build configurations that do not work correctly, especially around TKG. From time to time, I find that my TKG management cluster does not stand up successfully, and so I have to manually clear it down and start over. From time to time, this has left my NSX ALB with some objects that also need to be manually cleaned up. While I can delete Virtual Services and Virtual IP Addresses with ease in the NSX ALB portal/UI, I am sometimes left in a…

TKG v1.4 & NSX ALB – Ingress Health Monitor Anomaly

As I continue to look at TKG version 1.4, I wanted to start using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrated with the Project Contour (Envoy Ingress) package. Project Contour is a control plane for the Envoy Ingress that is included with the package, but which also has the ability to dynamically change the Ingress configuration. It is included as an add-on package to TKG v1.4. To use it, I deployed a TKG management cluster and a TKG workload cluster using an NSX ALB (v 20.1.5) for the Load Balancing Service. I then proceeded to deploy the Contour package. While the…

TKG v1.4 – Some nice new features

Over the last week or so, VMware recently announced the release of TKG version 1.4. On reading through the release notes, there were a few features that caught my eye, so I thought I would deploy a cluster and take a closer look. In particular, two features were of interest. The first of these is support for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) service in workload clusters, which is available through the Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO). This is applicable when TKG is deployed on vSphere. There is also new support for the NSX ALB as a control plane endpoint provider.…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Storage

Following on from last week’s post, VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes, I decided to do another post on my other favorite topic – storage. As per other years, storage continues to evolve, both for traditional workloads and new modern application/container workloads. And as you might expect, there are lots of good sessions at this years VMworld 2021 event that highlights these new and upcoming storage innovations. Without further ado, here are my top 10 storage picks: Storage Vision and Strategy There are two storage sessions related to storage vision and strategy that I picked out. The…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes

Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…