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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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Custom webhook function to publish events into VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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In my previous article, I demonstrated how you can leverage the upcoming v0.7 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) to publish and consume custom events to easily extend your event-driven automation to other event sources. As a recap, this is accomplished by constructing and sending a conformant CloudEvent to VEBA, which can then be consumed by your functions.


This is perfect for external event sources that can create a custom HTTP payload that conforms to the CloudEvent specification, however not all solutions have this type of functionality or flexibility. An alternative solution to this is to simply create a VEBA function that can accept a custom payload and then handle the transformation of the data into a valid CloudEvent and then forward that off to broker running within VEBA. This is just one of the many benefits of Knative, the backend for VEBA, where each function deployment includes an endpoint that is automatically served as a subdomain to the VEBA hostname (e.g. https://my-function.NAMESPACE.VEBA-FQDN)


This solution would enable external "Event Producer" to send a non-CloudEvent payload which can then be processed by your function and re-publish as a conformant CloudEvent that can then be consumed by other function and services.

  1. Event Provider would make HTTP request to the function webhook with a custom payload
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed by the webhook function
  3. Webhook function will then forward the CloudEvent internally to the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents

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Quick Tip - How to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) with a single Service Engine

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I saw an interesting question today from Robert Kloosterhuis in the private vExpert App Modernization Slack Channel who working with vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) and wanted to know if it was possible to deploy NSX-ALB with just a single Service Engine (SE)?

The default behavior of NSX-ALB is to deploy two SE for availability purpose but for testing and/or homelab usage, it could certainly help with resources and time to spin up an environment using NSX-ALB. I was also curious if this was possible and reached out to NSX-ALB Engineering team and within a few minutes, I got a response that not only was this possible to do but pretty easy to configure.

To modify this default behavior, we need to update the Service Engine group prior to SE VMs being deployed. To do so, login to NSX-ALB UI and under Infrastructure->Service Engine Group and then click on the Advanced tab and change the default Buffer Service Engines value of 1 to 0 which will will have NSX-ALB deploy just a single SE VM rather than the default two.


To confirm that our NSX-ALB have been configured correctly, I have enabled vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-ALB and as you can see from the screenshot below, only a single SE VM has been deployed rather than the default behavior of two SE.