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Closer look at vSphere Permissions for vSphere with Tanzu 

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Questions regarding vSphere Permissions for vSphere with Tanzu has been frequently brought up more lately and the majority of questions that I have seen, has primarily focused on the behavior of the vSphere UI Inventory. After taking a closer look and experimenting with a few permutations within my lab, I realized that most folks were simply focusing on what they were most familiar with, which is using the vSphere UI to interact with vSphere.

Although vSphere with Tanzu is tightly integrated with vSphere and the vSphere UI is certainly a primary interface, it is certainly not the only interface nor is it always the interface for end users like a developer. Depending on the needs of your end users and how your organization wishes to grant access to a vSphere Namespace, there are actually a few options that are available to you. In fact, users can interact with vSphere with Tanzu without ever logging into the vSphere UI and that is completely valid and may even be desirable for some organizations.

Note: The custom kubectl plugin for vSphere (kubectl-vsphere) which is needed to interact with vSphere with Tanzu can be downloaded by simply opening a browser (or use wget) to following URL: https://[SUPERVISOR-CLUSTER-IP]/wcp/plugin/[OS]-amd64/vsphere-plugin.zip, where OS is darwin, linux or windows (e.g. https://172.17.33.33/wcp/plugin/darwin-amd64/vsphere-plugin.zip)

Below are the results of my testing using the various vSphere Roles and Groups including the various behavior across the different consumption interfaces including the vSphere UI. To help better illustrate the results, I am also using some example personas, these are purely used as an example and may differ based on your organizational needs.

Persona: VI/Cloud Admin

In this scenario, the user is a vSphere Administrator and has the following memberships:

  • vSphere Role: Administrator
  • vSphere SSO Group: Administrators
  • vSphere Namespace: SSO User and/or Active Directory User

The user will be able to view and manage all vSphere infrastructure including the vSphere Namespaces and the respective workloads including TKG Workload Clusters and/or VMs via the VM Service.

Here is a summary of this users access:

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Exploration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-vCenter Server templating using YTT

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The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.

While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment ? and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!

This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.

After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressions  🙂

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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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