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…
I was recently running through the exercise of deploying Cert Manager, Contour (+ Envoy Ingress), Prometheus and Grafana packages available with TKG v1.4, just to see what steps were involved in setting up a full monitoring stack for my TKG cluster. This was a TKG deployment to vSphere, using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for Load Balancer functionality. You can read about the new enhancements around the NSX ALB and TKG v1.4 here. Honestly, it is pretty straight-forward, with some detailed documentation on the topic available here. Everything was plain sailing until I tried to deploy the Grafana package with,…
I’ve been using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for many of my experiments in the lab. Sometimes I build configurations that do not work correctly, especially around TKG. From time to time, I find that my TKG management cluster does not stand up successfully, and so I have to manually clear it down and start over. From time to time, this has left my NSX ALB with some objects that also need to be manually cleaned up. While I can delete Virtual Services and Virtual IP Addresses with ease in the NSX ALB portal/UI, I am sometimes left in a…
As I continue to look at TKG version 1.4, I wanted to start using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer integrated with the Project Contour (Envoy Ingress) package. Project Contour is a control plane for the Envoy Ingress that is included with the package, but which also has the ability to dynamically change the Ingress configuration. It is included as an add-on package to TKG v1.4. To use it, I deployed a TKG management cluster and a TKG workload cluster using an NSX ALB (v 20.1.5) for the Load Balancing Service. I then proceeded to deploy the Contour package. While the…
Over the last week or so, VMware recently announced the release of TKG version 1.4. On reading through the release notes, there were a few features that caught my eye, so I thought I would deploy a cluster and take a closer look. In particular, two features were of interest. The first of these is support for the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) service in workload clusters, which is available through the Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO). This is applicable when TKG is deployed on vSphere. There is also new support for the NSX ALB as a control plane endpoint provider.…
Tanzu Kubernetes v1.3 introduces OIDC and LDAP identity management with Pinniped and Dex. Pinniped allows you to plug external OpenID Connect (OIDC) or LDAP identity providers (IDP) into Tanzu Kubernetes clusters which in turn allows you to control access to those clusters. Pinniped uses Dex as the endpoint to connect to your upstream LDAP identity provider, e.g. Microsoft Active Directory. If you are using OpenID Connect (OIDC), Dex is not required. It is also my understanding that eventually Pinniped with eventually integrate directly with LDAP as well, removing the need for Dex. But for the moment, both components are required.…
I recently posted about a new feature in vSphere with Tanzu called VM Service which became available with vSphere 7.0U2a. In a nutshell, this new service allows developers to provision not just Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters and PodVMs in their respective namespaces. Now they can also provision native Virtual Machines as well. The VM Service introduces a new feature called VirtualMachineClassBindings to a developer, and has also introduced some new behaviour around an existing feature, VirtualMachineClass. VirtualMachineClass describes the available resource sizing for virtual machines. They describe how much compute and memory to allocate to a VM, and also if the…