VMware Fusion v12 – Kubernetes / Kind integration

I recently took a look at the container integration features in VMware Fusion v11.5.6 through the vctl command line feature. I was intrigued to read about a future feature coming in version 12, which included some Kind integration. For those of you unfamiliar with Kind, it is a way of deploying Kubernetes in containers. It might sound a bit strange, but it is actually very powerful, and is used by a lot of developers for many different use-cases. This post is going to look at vctl with this new Kind integration in VMware Fusion version 12. Let’s see how to…

ESXi host Time & date actions menu not working in 7.0 host client – Workaround

This is something I noticed in the vSphere 7.0 host client. The actions button in the host client for the System > Time & date isn’t working. This means that we have to find an alternate method to enable NTP on the stand-alone host. What we will need to do is the following: Configure NTP startup policy and NTP server(s) Enable the NTP port in the Firewall Rules Start the NTP service manually Verify NTP is working 1. Configure NTP startup policy and NTP server To begin, select the correct NTP service startup policy and NTP server from the System…

Getting started with VCF Part 10 – Kubernetes deployment

With Enterprise PKS deployed in a Workload Domain in VMware Cloud Foundation, we now come to the point where we can begin to create Kubernetes clusters and deploy some containerized applications. We need access to some tooling to achieve this. One option is to SSH onto the Operations Manager appliance, as it has many of the necessary tools already installed. However, I prefer to do this in my own management/jump desktop rather than use components that are part of the actual product. In this post, I will show you the steps to get setup with the required tool-set, deploy your…

Getting started with VCF Part 7 – NSX-T Edge

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…

Getting started with VCF Part 3 – vRealize Automation Prerequisites

Continuing on my journey of ramping up on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), my next step is to go through the deployment of vRealize Automation. This is again done via the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLM). We’ve already seen how to deploy out vRealize Operations through vRSLM in part 2. And in part 1, we saw the initial VCF management domain deployment. In this post we will take a detailed look at what needs to be put in place in order to be able to deploy vRealize Automation (vRA). Now, there are quite a number of prerequisites needed before we can…

WaveFront Collector Issues: Error in scraping containers

I was very pleased last week, as I managed to get a bunch of metrics sent from my Kubernetes cluster into Wavefront by chaining proxies together. I was successfully able to see my cluster’s Kube-state Metrics and Kubernetes Collector Metrics in Wavefront. However, on closer inspection, I noticed that a number of the built-in Wavefront Kubernetes dashboards were not being populated (Kubernetes Metrics and Kubernetes Metrics by Namespace), and then I found a number of errors in the Wavefront collector logs in my deployment. This post will describe what these errors were, and how I rectified them. There were 2…

Validating Kubernetes cluster conformance with Sonobuoy

Another product added to the VMware portfolio with the acquisition of Heptio is Sonobuoy. In a nutshell, Sonobuoy will validate the state of your Kubernetes cluster by running a suite of non-destructive tests against your cluster. As part of the end-to-end (e2e) tests that are run by Sonobuoy, there is a also a subset of conformance tests run as well. These include things like best practices and interoperability tests. This will ensure that your Kubernetes cluster (whether is an upstream version or a third-party packaged version) supports all of the necessary Kubernetes APIs. You can read more about conformance here.…