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Quick Tip - vSphere Permission to view vSphere with Tanzu Namespaces

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If you wish to create a custom vSphere Role that has the ability to view vSphere Namespaces which is part of vSphere with Tanzu, you will need to add the user to the following vSphere Single Sign-On Group: ServiceProviderUsers, which is located under Single Sign On->Users and Groups->Groups (2nd page) within the vSphere UI.


Once added, you can logout and log back in and the user should now see the vSphere Namespaces as shown in the screenshot below. In my example, I have a user named william which is created in the default vsphere.local domain and has been assigned the user the vSphere Read Only role along with this additional SSO group. They will be able to view all resources but will not have permission to make any changes to the infrastructure. If you are using Active Directory, the exact same process works and just make sure you log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

IT Admins can be a key enabler to an organizations App Modernization efforts

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Whether you call it Digital Transformation, Digital First, Application Modernization (App Modernization) or some other fancy name, the fact of the matter is, almost every single business is going through some form of transformation to become more competitive in this new digital era. According to a recent survey by VMware, 91% of executives agree their major app initiative in 2021 is to migrate and modernize legacy apps. While this transformation has been going on for some time, the COVID-19 global pandemic has certainly super charged its acceleration and is now a critical imperative for many organizations to be able to create and deliver new digital experiences for their end users.

As part of my role within the VMware Cloud team, I have been taking a closer look at how some of our customers are thinking about their App Modernization strategy and to better understand their overall plan and thought process. With some of the recent customer conversations that I have had, many organizations are just starting their App Modernization journey and one of the challenges that I have observed is simply where and how to get started. There are certainly many different factors that can affect or even slow down these initiatives including organizational structure, tension between lines of businesses, development, operations and IT teams. However, before an organization can decide what application/services they are interested in modernizing, they need to first have a complete understanding of their current application estate.

This understanding is critical before an organization can determine the appropriate modernization strategy (Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor or Retire) for a given application.


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Configuring NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS

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One of the exciting new features of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) 1.3 release is the support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) as a Layer-4 load balancer solution for your Kubernetes (K8s) based workloads. Most recently, there were a couple of customer inquiries asking whether TKG 1.3 and NSX ALB is supported on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and the answer is yes!


I suspect part of the reason on why this question came up is that it may have been difficult to find a clear support stance for this configuration and although there is some documentation in the AVI Portal for installing NSX ALB on VMConAWS, it certainly was not easy to find. I personally also found the instructions to a be on the lighter side after reading through a few times. Since I already had my TKG Demo Appliance Fling deployed in my VMConAWS SDDC, it was easy enough to un-deploy my existing TKG Management Cluster and set it up with NSX ALB. You can find the detailed instructions below and although the setup of NSX ALB and TKG is similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment as recently documented by Cormac Hogan, there are still some subtle differences, especially if you are not placing both TKG and NSX ALB systems all on the same single, which you may find in demos 🙂

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