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Quick Tip - Rebooting VCSA causes vSphere with Tanzu to show ESXi hosts not licensed for Workload Management

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I had just setup a new vSphere with Tanzu environment running on my Intel NUC for an upcoming blog post and after rebooting the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), I had noticed the Workload Management UI threw the following licensing error:

None of the hosts connected to this vCenter are licensed for Workload Management.

This was quite strange since both the ESXi host and VCSA was just installed less than a day ago which I was using the default 60 day evaluation that is automatically built in.

The even weirder thing was that I was still able perform operations using the Workload Management APIs, so I figured this must be a vSphere UI bug but could not find a way to get the UI to display. After reaching out to some folks internally, a suggestion was given on using either incognito mode or another browser and to my surprise, that fixed the problem! I suspect there is some cookie that was set during the initial Workload Management enablement when going through the evaluation workflow which now causes this unexpected early check for licensing.

I have already filed an internal bug but if you do hit this problem, simply clear your cookies for the the VCSA and the Workload Management UI will not properly display again.

TKG Demo Appliance on VMware Cloud on DellEMC

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We have been getting interests from customers on wanting to run Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on our VMware Cloud on DellEMC (VMConDellEMC) offering and I was asked to see if my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance would also work on this VMware Cloud solution, especially as it works great on both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as existing premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or later environments.

With the help from our VMConDellEMC team, I got access to an SDDC and was able to validate that everything works as outlined in my TKG workshop guide. I have also updated the pre-req documentation to include a specific section for setting up VMConDellEMC SDDC, most of which is similiar to existing networking requirements. Once you have your customer uplink network configured to your VMConDellEMC SDDC, you will be able to reach the TKG Demo Appliance running on the NSX-T Segment. The thing about the setup is that TKG Demo Appliance is built in an air-gap fashion, so no internet access is required, which by default, the TKG CLI will assume. This is great way to quickly get started with TKG and playing with Kubernetes!


This was actually my first time using VMConDellEMC and I thought I would push the limits a bit and deploying a slightly larger TKG Workload Cluster than I normally would, especially since I got access to a 5-Node SDDC 😀

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Mapping between vSphere Container Volume to Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 using PowerCLI

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With the introduction of the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) 2.1, it looks like the previous method outlined by Cormac Hogan no longer applies when looking to map between a vSphere Container Volume (CV), which is a vSphere construct to the underlying Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), which is a Kubernetes construct.


William Arroyo, a K8s Solution Engineer recently noticed this behavior change and was asking if there was a way to use PowerCLI to still perform this look up. Given I had provided the original PowerCLI snippet on Cormac's blog, I was curious myself and since I had just rebuilt my vSphere with Tanzu environment, I figured I take a quick look to see where this new information might now be placed.

I did also want to mention that you can easily find this information using the vSphere UI by just clicking on the "Details" box next to the PVC


With the latest PowerCLI 12.1 release, we have a number of Cloud Native Storage (CNS) cmdlets that we can leverage and after a quick minute of poking around, this new information can be found using the Get-CnsVolume cmdlet and using the ExtensionData property to get more detailed properties.

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