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History of Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and its productization in vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (p02)

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I am super excited to share that the popular Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility Fling has been officially productized and is now available with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (Patch 02)! The official name for this capability is now referred to as Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion, would that mean the short hand is Ax-vMotion? ? In any case, this has literally been 5 years in the making from an idea that I had shared back in 2015 to now having it fully integrated as a native vSphere feature in 2020 is pretty wild!

While reflecting back and writing this blog post, I came across this tweet from our CEO, Pat Gelsinger, which I thought was quite fitting

I have learned over the years, that simply having a good idea is not enough. It takes hard work, time and perseverance.

It has been very humbling to work with so many of customers of all sizes and shapes and enabling them to take advantage of vMotion in a new way that would allow them to solve some of their unique business needs. vMotion is still as magical in 2020 as it was when VMware transformed the IT industry when it was first introduced.

Of course this would not have been possible without the support of so many amazing VMware Engineers who contributed to the Fling including the original developer, Vishal Gupta who I had worked with as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. After Vishal left VMware, I recruited a few more folks to help with the project including Vladimir Velikov, Vikas Shitole, Rajmani Patel, Plamen Semerdzhiev and Denis Chorbadjiyski. Lastly, I also want to thank Vishwa Srikaanth and Abhijith Prabhudev from the vSphere Product Management team who have been supportive of the Fling since day 1 and has been advocating with me on behalf of our customers.

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Quick Tip - Easily identify source DHCP server using ESXi DCUI

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While installing the ESXi 7.0 Update 1 on one of my physical system, I happened to be in the "Configure Management Network" section of the ESXi Direct Console UI (DCUI) and noticed something I had never seen before. As shown in the screenshot, it now shows the IP Address of the DHCP server in which ESXi received the DHCP lease.


I had not noticed this before and after asking on Twitter, it looks like this is definitely a new enhancement that was added fairly recently. I did not see this in one of my ESXi 6.7 Update 3 deployments, but it may have came in a later patch but definitely new in ESXi 7.0 or greater. Not only is this a quick and easy way to identify the DHCP server being used but in case you need to track down an unexpected rogue DHCP server running, this will certainly come in handy as pointed out by John.

Using Terraform to deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu 

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A few months back I saw that HashiCorp had released a new Kubernetes (K8s) Provider for Terraform, currently in Alpha state, which enable users to deploy K8s resources using the popular Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool. I thought this would be pretty cool if it works with our vSphere with Tanzu solution, since the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service uses ClusterAPI via a custom VM Operator to deploy TKG Guest Clusters which is just a fancy way of saying it uses K8s API to deploy more K8s 🙂

UPDATE (04/27/21) - vSphere 7.0 Update 2a has resolved the admission webhook issue and users can now deploy TKG Guest Cluster using K8s Provider for Terraform

The setting up the new K8s provider was pretty straight forward and after spending a few minutes in figuring out how to convert my existing TKG YAML to the required HCL format for Terraform to understand, I was able to to run a terraform "plan" but quickly ran into the following error:

failed: admission webhook "default.mutating.tanzukubernetescluster.run.tanzu.vmware.com" does not support dry run

It looks like our tanzukubernetescluster admission webhooks does not currently support dry run operations which can be quite useful but also common when using Terraform. I figured this was the end of that idea and I ended up just filing a feature enhancement internally for adding this support in the future as I can see this being quite useful for our customers.

After finishing up recent pet project of getting a fully functional vSphere with Tanzu on a homelab budget and just using 32GB of memory, I decided to take another look at this and discovered the required tweak to get this working was super trivial, literally a single line change.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk.

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