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…
I’m sure most readers are now aware that we now have 2 versions of what was initially called “Project Pacific” at VMworld 2019. Our initial release with vSphere 7.0 (vSphere with Kubernetes) was only available with VCF & NSX-T. However, with the release of vSphere 7.0U1, whilst we continue to have VCF with Tanzu, there is a new version outside of VCF called vSphere with Tanzu. I have written about how to get started with this new version, from covering the prerequisites, deploying a HA-Proxy, enabling vSphere with Tanzu Workload Management and deploying your first TKG ‘guest’ cluster. In this…
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…
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…
After spending quite a bit of time looking at vSphere with Kubernetes, and how one could deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) “guest” cluster in a namespace with a simple manifest file, I thought it was time to look at other ways in which customers could deploy TKG clusters on top of vSphere infrastructure. In other words, deploy TKG without vSphere with Kubernetes, or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) for that matter. This post will look at TKG multi-cloud (TKGm) version 1.1.2 and in particular the tkg command line tool to first deploy a TKG management cluster, and once that is…
I was recently asked to participate in the Gestalt IT podcast. The format was a little different to what I am used to. In the podcast, Stephen Foskett suggests a premise and the participants are asked to share their opinions on it. Essentially, pick a side. Do you agree or disagree with the premise? In this podcast, the premise was Orchestration is the reason enterprises haven’t adopted containers. During the conversation, I had the opportunity to talk about a number of initiatives that are on-going at VMware related to Kubernetes. Have a listen and let me know what you think.
Recently I was asked if “statically” provisioned persistent volumes (PVs) in native, vanilla, Kubernetes would be handled by Cloud Native Storage (CNS) in vSphere 7.0 and in turn appear in the vSphere client, just like a dynamically provisioned persistent volume. The short answer is yes, this is supported and works. The details on how to do this are shown here in this post. I am going to use a file-based (NFS) volume for this “static” PV test. Note that there are two ways of provisioning a static file-based volumes. The first is to use the in-tree NFS driver. These are…