As many regular readers will be aware, I’ve spent a bit of time in the past looking at how vSphere resources are consumed by Kubernetes objects, when Kubernetes is deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. While much of this is visible in the vSphere client, I’m focused on how to see this vSphere resource consumption from within Kubernetes. If I am working in Kubernetes, I’d rather not context switch out to the vSphere client just to see how much storage is left on a datastore or how much CPU and Memory is left on…
I’ve spent a lot of time recently on creating and building out vSphere with Tanzu environment, with the goal of deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster. I frequently used the kubectl-vsphere command to logout of the Supervisor namespace context and login to the Guest cluster context. This allowed me to start deploying stateful and stateful apps in my Tanzu Kubernetes Guest cluster. I thought no more about this step until a recent conversation with my colleague Frank Denneman. He queried whether or not Kubernetes developers would actually have vSphere privileges to do this. It was a great question which led…
One of the new features introduced in vSphere 7.0U1 is HCI-Mesh, the ability to remotely mount vSAN datastores between vSAN clusters managed by the same vCenter Server. My buddy and colleague Duncan has done a great write-up on this topic on his yellow-bricks blog. In this post, I am going to look at how to address the situation of selecting the correct vSAN datastore when provisioning Kubernetes Persistent Volumes in an environment which uses HCI-Mesh. This will address the support statement in the vSAN HCI-Mesh Tech-Note that states that the following use case is not supported: Remote provisioning workflows for…
In this final installment of my “vSphere with Tanzu” posts, we are going to look at how to create our very first Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) guest cluster. In previous posts, we have compared vSphere with Tanzu to VCF with Tanzu, and covered the prerequisites. Then we looked at the steps involved in deploying the HA-Proxy to provide a load balancer service to vSphere with Tanzu. In my most recent post, we looked at the steps involved in enabling workload management. Now that all of that is in place, we are finally able to go ahead and deploy a TKG cluster,…
In earlier posts, we look at the differences between the original “VCF with Tanzu” offering and the new vSphere with Tanzu offering from VMware. One of the major differences is the use of HA-Proxy to provide a load balancing service, and the deployment steps of the HA-Proxy we covered in detail in a follow-up post. In this post, we are now ready to deploy vSphere with Tanzu, also known as enabling Workload Management. Prerequisites Revisited The prerequisites were covered in detail in the “Getting started” post, and you won’t have been able to successfully deploy the HA-Proxy without following them.…
In my Getting Started with vSphere with Tanzu blog post yesterday, we discussed the differences between vSphere with Tanzu and VCF with Tanzu. We also called out the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu. In this post, we will proceed to the next step and deploy the HA-Proxy appliance, which will provide Load Balancer functionality on behalf of the Supervisor cluster and the TKG clusters. Let’s start with a look at my simple networking configuration. This is how my lab environment looks at present. I have created a vSphere distributed switch and created 3 distributed portgroups. The management network is on…
With the release of vSphere 7.0U1, vSphere with Kubernetes has been decoupled from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VMware now has two vSphere with Kubernetes offerings, the original VCF based vSphere with Kubernetes offering, now referred to as VCF with Tanzu, and a newer offering outside of VCF, referred to as vSphere with Tanzu. This write-up is to step through the deployment of the new vSphere with Tanzu with HA-Proxy. I won’t cover everything in this single post, but will do a series of 4 posts stepping through the process. Differences: VCF with Tanzu and vSphere with Tanzu I thought it…