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Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

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Last week I demonstrated how to take advantage of the new Kubernetes Cluster API Bring Your Own Host (BYOH) Provider with a VM running on ESXi-Arm and managed with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). The Cluster API BYOH Provider is currently only tested and supported with an Ubuntu OS, but since the only requirements for a linux host was simply: kubeadm, kubelet and containerd, I figured it should also be possible with VMware's Photon OS which also has an Arm edition.

With a TON of trial/error and reverting snapshots, I was able to finally get Cluster API BYOH Provider to successful run on Photon OS as shared in a recent tweet.

What actually made this possible was actually the work I had done with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project which also involves Photon OS and Kubernetes. More specifically, I had recently worked on porting VEBA from using the Docker runtime to Containerd with Kubernetes and that prior experience was invaluable while figuring out how to do this with Photon OS (Arm) which also had its own challenges. The instructions below will help setup a Photon OS (Arm) VM that can then be used with Cluster API BOYH Provider and the previous article will still need to be reference for the complete setup.

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Hybrid (x86 and Arm) Kubernetes clusters using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

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With the recent introduction of Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), users can now easily get first hand experience across VMware's Tanzu portfolio, including VMware's Enterprise Kubernetes (K8s) runtime called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), all completely for free. One popular request that frequently comes up from our community is the ability to use TCE with the ESXi-Arm Fling.

Currently, TCE is only supported with x86 hardware platforms which includes ESXi-x86 and there is certainly a desire to be able to use TCE with Arm-based hardware running on top of ESXi-Arm, especially with inexpensive Raspberry Pi for learning and exploration purposes.

I recently came to learn about a really cool project that is being developed as part of VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) for a new Cluster API (CAPI) provider where you can Bring Your own Host (BYOH) that is already running Linux. What really intrigued me about their project was not the fact that they could create a TCE Workload Cluster that comprised of physical hosts but the fact that they were actually running on Arm hardware! ?

My immediate reaction was to see if this would also work with just Linux VMs? With some trial/error and help from Jixing Jia, one of the project maintainers, I was able to confirm that this indeed does works using Ubuntu VMs running on ESXi-Arm. What was even more impressive was the realization that this not only works for both physical and virtual Arm Linux systems, but that users could also create a hybrid TCE Workload Cluster that consists of BOTH x86 and Arm nodes! ?

I can only imagine the possibilities that this could enable in the future where application(s) could potentially span across CPU architecture, virtual and physical worker nodes which exposes different capabilities that can then be delivered based on the requirements of the application such as GPU as an example. It will be interesting to see the types of use cases the BYOH Cluster API Provider will help enable, especially pertaining to Edge computing.

If you are interested in playing with the BYOH Cluster API Provider, check out the detailed instructions below on how to get started. Since this is still currently in Alpha development, there are still a few manual steps and currently there is no native TCE integration. If this is something that is interesting to you, feel free to leave any feedback or better yet, leave comments directly on the Github repo asking for feature enhancements that you would like to see such as native support for TCE 😀

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Updates to USB Network & NVMe Community Driver for ESXi 7.0 Update 3

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Happy Thursday! I know many of you have been asking about the status and support for ESXi 7.0 Update 3 and the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi. It has taken a bit longer as Songtao (the Engineer behind the Fling) has also been extremely busy and was also recently on PTO. Although I know this is something folks use extensively, I do also want to remind everyone that this is provided as a Fling, which means it is developed and supported as time permits. I will certainly do my best to help get new releases out aligning with ESXi updates and as a reminder, a new version of the USB Fling will ALWAYS be required for major releases of ESXi, which also includes update releases.

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