As many readers are now aware, databases provisioned from DSM via VCF Automation have the option to create a vSphere Kubernetes Service cluster to host the database. The decision to use a VKS cluster or whether to use DSM’s own Kubernetes cluster is based on the Infrastructure Policy. If the Infrastructure Policy is built on traditional vSphere resources, then DSM’s own K8s is used. If the Infrastructure Policy points to a Supervisor Namespace, then VKS is used. In this post, I wanted to provide some tips and tricks on accessing and troubleshooting the DSM database and VKS cluster backing the…
Around 18 months ago, I published an article which highlighted a new feature called vSAN Data Persistence platform, or DPp for short. Basically, it describes a set of vSphere services built into vSphere with Tanzu. There are a few changes since I last wrote about it. For that reason, I thought I would revisit it. I am going to use my recently updated vCenter Server version 7.0.3e (build 19717403), and vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Cluster v1.22. In this post, I will go through the new steps that demonstrate how to install MinIO as a vSphere Service. I will then show…
I created a few short videos to show the integration between Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) and vSphere with Tanzu. In the first demonstration, I show the steps involved in registering the vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control. Basically, it involves retrieving a manifest from TMC, and deploying it to the Supervisor. In the second demo, I show how Tanzu Mission Control can be used to easily deploy Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) workload clusters to vSphere with Tanzu once the Supervisor Cluster has been registered. Of course, once TMC is managing your cluster, all sorts of additional features are…
This post will look at another new feature that has been added to the vSphere CSI driver v2.5. This feature enables the exposing of CSI metrics so that they can be collected by Prometheus and stored as time series data. Using the information captured in Prometheus, we can build Grafana dashboards which makes is easy to monitor the health and stability of the CSI driver. Kudos to one of our vSphere CSI driver engineers, Liping Xue, who did a great write-up on how to test this feature, and who’s content I relied on heavily to create this post. In the…
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…
As we head into VMworld 2021 this week, there will be many announcements about new and updated VMware products and features. However, there is one that I want to bring to your attention. It is something that I have been directly involved in, in some small way, and that something is Tanzu Community Edition. Tanzu Community Edition (sometimes referred to as TCE), is a free, open source Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) distribution which has all of the same open source software found in our commercial editions of Tanzu. Personally, I find this to be a really cool announcement for a number…
This week, I celebrate 16 years at VMware. It’s quite a milestone for me and the longest I have been with any company throughout my 32 year career. I thought I’d take a break from the technical posts and try to write something about how my career at VMware developed over the years, what were some of the paths & decisions I took, and also highlight a few of the people and events that influenced me along the way. In 2005, I was working at EMC in Cork (Ireland), in their technical support organization. EMC were a giant at the…