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VMware Flings Update

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This has been a difficult week for all VMware employees due to the pending acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. Many VMware employees are still waiting to hear back from Broadcom about their employment status either before and/or after the planned acquisition close date. I wanted to provide this context before sharing a quick update regarding the VMware Flings program.

On Tuesday October 24th, VMware Fling authors was made aware that the VMware Flings site (flings.vmware.com) would be taken down and website would simply be redirected to developer.vmware.com/samples starting on Thursday October 26th.

The VMware Flings program was operated and run by VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) and while I do not have specifics on why it needed to go down, I tried my best to share out the news as broadly and as quickly as I could so that folks could at least grab what they needed. While the original notice mentioned the site would function up until 10/26 at 5pm PST, it looks VMware IT had already made the DNS changes and the redirect has already been propagated.

As of right now, I do not know the future of the VMware Flings program, but I did want to share a few updates since the site and its downloads are no longer available.

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How to setup Harbor registry on Synology

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With my recent exploration of GenAI and using a private ChatGPT solution with my own blog posts, I quickly realized in the space of AI/ML, the required software dependencies can take up a significant amount of storage, especially for a kubernetes/container-based deployment.

To give you an example, to deploy the private ChatGPT (h2ogpt) application using kubernetes, just the container image itself is a whopping 40GB+! 😲

Unfourntately, this is not a one off scenario but a common theme when working in the AI/ML space that the size of the packages and drivers are extremely large even when using containers. I figure I should probably setup my own container registry instead of pulling directly from the Internet given the size of these images.

I already have a local Harbor instance running in a VM but with my Synology, I have been using it centralize a number of functions and that would be the ideal place to actually run Harbor. While you can run individual containers on the Synology as I have demonstrated HERE with GitLab, the Harbor installation processes relies on Docker Compose, which Synology does not natively support using the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) interface.

With a little bit of tinkering and trial/error, I was able to finally get Harbor running on my Synology and centralize all my storage needs including having my own container registry.

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Support for Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) on ESXi without vCenter Server?

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Starting with vSphere 6.7, users have been able to add a Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) to a VM, enabling guest operating systems to create and store private keys using a software-based representation of a physical TPM 2.0 chip, that is completely transparent to the underlying OS.

A major benefit of using vTPM is that a physical TPM chip is NOT required in the underlying ESXi host and the vTPM secrets are protected by encrypting the .nvram file, where the secrets are stored.

The encryption keys that are used to encrypt the vTPM is provisioned by a key provider, which can be either be an external Standard Key Provider (SKP) that is KMIP-compliant or using vCenter Server's built-in Native Key Provider (NKP). It is the management of these key providers and their workflows that requires the use of vCenter Server, providing a centralized control plane and a seamless user experience when using the vTPM feature.

Most recently, I saw an influx of inquiries from our field and customers asking about using vTPM with a standalone ESXi host that is NOT managed by vCenter Server, primarily for homelab purposes. While this question has come up in the past, the increased interests might be due to more folks looking to deploy Windows 11, which now has a requirement of a TPM.

While sharing this observation with our lead engineer for VM Encryption, I came to learn that while vCenter Server is highly recommended for a good vTPM user experience, it is technically NOT required for vTPM to function. This sounded very intriguing but surely this solution would NOT be supported right?!

Interestingly, vCenter Server simply uses a set of public vSphere APIs that are available directly on an ESXi host to add or remove encryption keys that is generated from the key provider but the functionality to manage the encryption keys are available on an ESXi host. While this "manual" method is not as seamless as using vCenter Server, you can enable vTPM for a VM using a standalone ESXi host that is not managed by vCenter Server in a completely supported manner!

The lesson here, do not always assume something is NOT supported until you have been told it is NOT supported and always be learning! 😁

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