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Automated vSphere 7 and vSphere with Kubernetes Lab Deployment Script

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I know many of you have been asking me about my vSphere with Kubernetes automation script which I had been sharing snippets of on Twitter. For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work making the required changes between the vSphere 7 Beta and GA workflows, some additional testing and of course documentation. Hopefully the wait was worth it (I think it is) and if you enjoy the script or have benefited, please consider adding ?to the Github repo to show your support! Thanks and enjoy

The Github repository:

Before getting started, please carefully read through the requirements section along with the complete sample end-to-end execution if you are new to vSphere with Kubernetes. You will need to have a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 license before you can get started and specifically an NSX-T Advance license which is one of the required parameters within the script. If you do not have access to a VCF 4 license, I strongly recommend taking part in the recent VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy effort which I had started to easily get access to the latest VMware releases along with a nice 15% discount!

The script supports deploying both a standard vSphere 7 environment with just VCSA, ESXi and vSAN as well as the complete solution which includes NSX-T to support vSphere with Kubernetes. For more details, please refer to the FAQ.

Automating the creation of NSX-T "Disconnected" Segments for DR testing on VMware Cloud on AWS 

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Disaster Recovery (DR) and Disaster Avoidance (DA) on VMware Cloud on AWS is still one of the most popular use case amongst our customers, just second to Datacenter Migration and Evacuation. The VMware Site Recovery service makes it extremely easy and cost effective for customers to protect their critical workloads without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Most often, the biggest cost of having a dedicated DR site is the on-going operational and maintenance cost of that infrastructure.

Most recently I have seen several requests come in where customers were looking to streamline their DR testing which is fantastic to hear. Just having a DR solution is not enough, you actually need to exercise it and verify that your workloads and applications are functioning as expected. Today, customers can verify that their applications are functioning as expected by creating NSX-T network segments that are "Disconnected" and then using a VM-based router to provide internal connectivity between these isolated environments.

Here is a screenshot of the VMware Cloud console and under the Networking & Security tab, when creating a new segment you can specify whether the segment is "Connected" (Routed) or "Disconnected".


Obviously, the NSX-T UI is just one way of creating a segment. In fact, most customers that have asked about this is wanting to do this via Automation which not only brings speed to testing but also consistency! With that, I have updated my NSX-T PowerShell Community Module for VMC to include two new updates. If you have never used this VMC module before, please take a look at the Getting Started guide here.

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Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme - First "Modular" NUC

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The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! ?

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

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