Please support/donate to our friend, Alan Renouf and his family

For those of us in the VMware community, you will know of Alan Renouf. He used to be our Mr. PowerCLI, but most recently he is our Virtual and Augmented Reality guy. If you know Alan, you’ll know that he is one of the nicest and kindest guys you could meet. A number of years back, Alan and his family moved to the Bay Area and found a beautiful home in the hills over looking Santa Cruz. I had the pleasure of visiting him and Elizabeth on a few occasions – he always invited me down to visit when I…

New vTopology enhancement – display CSI version

I added a few enhancements to vTopology recently, notably the ability to display the details about the version and status of the vSphere CSI driver that is being used in a Kubernetes (K8s) deployment. I tested this on native K8s, vSphere with Tanzu TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) guest clusters, standalone TKG clusters as well as TKGI (formerly Enterprise PKS). Using the -csi option, you can now get details regarding the image versions, and also checks on the ready state of the CSI controller and CSI nodes. This is the example take from a standalone TKG deployment. simply ensure that your…

Encrypting Kubernetes Persistent Volumes on vSphere (Video)

In this video, we look at how to create a Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with the VM Encryption feature which can be used with vSphere CSI/CNS to create a Kubernetes Storage Class that encrypts Persistent Volumes. This feature is only available with the CSI 2.0 driver for native, upstream Kubernetes deployed on vSphere 7.0 (at the time of writing). You will also need to have a Key Management Server available to the vSphere host to create a policy that allows encryption. Finally, encrypted Persistent Volumes can only be attached to encrypted virtual machines, meaning that at least one of…

Cloud Native Storage (CNS) in vSphere with Kubernetes/Tanzu (Video)

A short video explaining the role of the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver and CNS (Cloud Native Storage) in both the vSphere with Kubernetes/Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and in the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Guest Cluster. This video discusses the role of the CSI driver in the Supervisor cluster, and the pvCSI driver (para-virtual CSI driver) in the TKG guest cluster. We also look at how the pvCSI communicates CNS control plane in the vCenter Server via the CSI driver in the Supervisor Cluster to request Persistent Volume operations on behalf of the Guest Cluster.

Getting started with the TKGm (multi-cloud) Command Line (Videos)

In this post, I have two short videos demonstrating how to (1) deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud (TKGm) management cluster using the “tkg” command line tool, and then once the TKG management cluster has been deployed, I show how to (2) very simply deploy a subsequent TKG workload cluster using the same “tkg” command. Note that at I have updated this post to use the TKGm acronym, as this is now how we are marketing this particular product. Previously, the term standalone was used. If you wish to know more detail, check out my full post on how to…

vRSLCM – Binary Mapping from Local are not listed – Solved

As mentioned in a previous post this week, I am looking at vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM). I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I am trying to use it in much the same way as one of our customers would use it. I previously stood up vRSLCM, so now I am at the point of where I would like to deploy another vRealize application, namely vRealize Operations. Rather than pulling the OVA image from My VMware, I wanted to see the behaviour when I manually download the latest vROps OVA, version 8.1.1, and store it directly on…

vRSLCM deployment – Failed to send http data – Solved

Yesterday I spun my wheels a bit on an issue I encountered whilst trying to deploy vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM) via the vRealize Easy Installer. I downloaded the ISO, opened it up, navigated to the vrlcm-ui-installer folder and clicked on the installer.exe. I selected the Install option, then went through the steps to roll-out the vRSLCM product, as shown below. Almost immediately on completing the deployment I hit this error: “Failed to send http data”: I examined the logs and this is what I found: 2020-07-13T13:49:45.201Z – info: output:PROGRESS 2020-07-13T13:49:50.307Z – info: output: 2020-07-13T13:49:50.310Z – info: output: ERROR…