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Quick Tip - Configuring vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster with self-signed container registry

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Over the weekend, I had finished building a small container application that I had developed on my local desktop, which worked great. However, the real test was to deploy the application on a vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster, which would require the container image to be hosted in a container registry.

Rather than using a public container registry, like many organizations, you typically would setup an internal registry that your infrastructure could have access to. Harbor is my go to container registry and is extremely simple to setup as it uses docker-compose under the hood.

After uploading my container image to Harbor, if you try to deploy it to your VKS Cluster, you will immediately see the following image pull error:

tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority


Just like any system that attempts to connect to an endpoint with a self-signed TLS certificate that it can not verify, it will not trust which is the default behavior.

For our VKS Cluster to be able to successfully pull an image from Harbor with a self-signed TLS certificate, we need to add the trusted CA to our vSphere Namespace and then reference that as part of our VKS Cluster deployment.

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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Configuring External IdP for Multiple VCF Automation Organizations

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This post is part of a short series that builds on our minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 deployment (2x Minisforum MS-A2) and showcases how to fully leverage the exciting new capabilities in the VCF 9 platform, all while maintaining a minimal resource footprint, which is ideal for lab and learning purposes.

In this blog post, we will walk through the setup of connecting a VCF Automation (VCFA) Organization to an external identity provider (IdP) using a free and self-hosted solution called Keycloak, which I am also using for setting up VCF Single Sign-On (SSO) capability. Depending on your goals for your VCFA lab environment, the ability to explore different IdP policies (e.g. MFA, etc) for an organization to experimenting with VCFA roles and access controls, will ultimately depend on the capabilities of your IdP


Since I am using Keycloak as my IdP, I can create what is known as a realm, which allows me to manage a collection of users and groups. From a single Keycloak Realm, I can then create multiple OIDC Application Clients that can then be used to provide authentication to both my VCFA Provider Admin Portal (via VCF SSO) as well as to the different VCFA User Organizations as depicted in the visual below, all backed by a single realm.


Keycloak allows customization of the IdP login screen, which is a pretty common feature of most IdP. For Keycloak specifically, the login customization is defined on per-realm basis, so you would need to create multiple realms that would then contain an OIDC Application Client for your desired VCFA Organizations which is depicted in the diagram below.


For MFA policies such as mandating a second factor or enforcing passkeys (YubiKey, Apple FaceID, Apple TouchID, etc), while these can be defined at a realm-level, you can override this on per OIDC Application Client. The above illustration is purely for simple lab setup, you can certainly setup a more complex environment with different IdPs that is connected to each VCFA Organization which will closely mirror environment like a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) than a typical Enterprise who might only have a single IdP.

Note: Keycloak has an extensive framework for building custom themes, I am using this KoreUI theme package, which I was able to hack up to build the customization screens you see in the very first screenshot.

Here are some additional VCF Automation IdP Resources that might be of interests if you would like to learn more:

Requirements:

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Quick Tip - Workaround for High CPU usage for ccs-k3s-app in VCF 9.0 Automation 

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On a few occasions, I have noticed that after the initial deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 that also includes VCF Automation (VCFA), the VCFA VM can experience a sustained CPU usage spikes exceeding 30 GHz.


Interestingly, VCFA continues to function fine and I am still able to connect to both VCFA Provider Admin/Organization Portals and perform tasks. In fact, I would not have noticed if it was not for the fans on my MS-A2 spinning like crazy and was able to track it down to ESXi host running the VCFA VM.

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