WilliamLam.com

Packer reference for VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance

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I recently had a need to setup a container registry for a project that I was working on and Harbor was of course my default choice. Although Harbor is pretty easy to setup, I did not want to manually go through the installation each time I needed Harbor and I figured it was time to build my own Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA), just like I have shown in the past with these reference implementations here and here.

UPDATE (02/03/23) - VMware has productized and is now shipping an official VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA) as part of the latest Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (2.1) release.

For those interested, you can find the reference implementation for building a Harbor Virtual Appliance at https://github.com/lamw/harbor-appliance

When deploying the Harbor Appliance, you will find the basic OVF properties that I have encoded including networking, credentials, debugging and advanced settings. Hopefully should be pretty straight forward for anyone who has deployed an OVA before to vSphere.

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Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management


In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.

How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

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If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.


Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk