I decided to dedicate a post to taking care of the Enterprise PKS prerequisites when deploying on VMware Cloud Foundation, namely the creation of the various certificates needed for trusted communication between the Enterprise PKS components (Operations Manager, BOSH, PKS and Harbor) and the rest of the environment. Unfortunately, the official VCF 3.9 documentation is a little light on the subject, simply stating that you should ‘Generate CA-Signed Certificates for Operations Manager, BOSH Director, Enterprise PKS control plane, and Harbor Registry‘. Therefore I decided that since it took me a bit of time to get these certificates setup for PKS…
I think now is a good time to take a recap on what we have built so far with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). We’ve done a number of activities to date, notably the deployment of the management domain in part 1. Then we spend some time deploying the vRealize Suite of products in parts 2, 3 and 4. In part 5, we commissioned some additional ESXi hosts and then most recently we created our first workload domain in part 6, which included the deployment of NSX-T 2.5. Now we come to quite a long section, which is the deployment of…
The VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 journey continues. In this post, we are going to build our very first workload domain (WLD). In part 5, we commissioned 3 x vSphere 6.7U3 ESXi hosts that will form the basis of our new WLD. A number of actions will take place during this deployment. Firstly, a new 6.7 vCenter Server will be deployed in the management domain. Then, the 3 commissioned ESXi hosts will be clustered together, allowing vSAN and vSphere HA to be enabled. We will also see NSX-T (version 2.5) deployed for the WLD as I am going to deploy NSX-T…
After taking care of all of the prerequisite steps highlighted in my VMware Cloud Foundation Part 3 post, we are now ready to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA) via vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM) in the VCF SDDC Manager. This will be a relatively shorter “show and tell” post, which will take you through the deployment steps. It will also show you how you can monitor the progress of the vRA deployment. The complete deployment does take some time since there are quite a number of virtual appliances and virtual machines that need to be rolled out for vRA (11 in…
I have been receiving a number of queries lately with regards to First Class Disks (FCD) on vSphere, also referred to as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD). Some time back, I wrote a primer on FCDs and more recently I wrote about Safekeeper, a tool for interacting with FCDs which is available on GitHub as OpenSource. This may be why there has been an increase in awareness and I am seeing more questions about FCDs. In this post, I want to address some of the most common FCD/IVD questions that I have received to date. Feel free to leave comments if…
After returning from the holidays, one of the items at the top of my agenda was to become more familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those of you who are not familiar with VCF, it is basically the ‘easy button’ for deploying the full vSphere stack of products, including virtual storage (vSAN), virtual networking (NSX) as well as monitoring and logging products such as vRealize Operation, vRealize Log Insight and so on. However, it is so much more, because once VCF is stood up, it becomes the building block for the deployment of what could be termed the application…
I’ve been looking at ways in which we could query the mappings of objects between the Kubernetes layer and the vSphere layer. One thing that I really wanted to figure out is if I have the VolumeHandle from the Persistent Volume in Kubernetes, could I easily find the datastore and path using PowerCLI. It looks like I can. Let’s begin with a look at the Persistent Volume or PV for short. Note that this is a Kubernetes cluster that is using the new vSphere CSI driver.