Understanding the Tanzu portfolio (and the new names for VMware modern app products)

The new Tanzu portfolio has a plethora of new (and not so new) Kubernetes products that we are all getting used to. There are also some new names that we are using for existing VMware products. I decided to dedicate some time to figuring it all, and documenting it here for future posterity as I know others are also finding the new branding a challenge. Note that I’m not including the new suite of products that were added to the Tanzu portfolio when VMware acquired Pivotal. This post is focusing purely on the Kubernetes related products. Enterprise PKS is now…

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 9 – PKS deployment

We are nearing the end of our journey with Getting Started with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). In this post, we will go through the deployment of Enterprise PKS v1.5 on a Workload Domain created in VCF v3.9. We’ve been through a number of steps to get to this point, all of which can be found here. Now we have some of the major prerequisites in place, notably NSX-T Edge networking and PKS Certificates, so we can proceed with the Enterprise PKS deployment. However, there are still a few additional prerequisites needed before we can start. Let’s review those first of…

Getting started with VCF Part 8 – PKS Certificates

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…