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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.0

10.28.2020 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Happy to share that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling has been updated to support the latest TKG 1.2.0 release which just came out a couple of weeks ago. The TKG Workshop Guide has been updated to reflect all new TKG 1.2 changes along with an updated vSphere Content Library containing all the OVA required to get started. As mentioned in the workshop guide, you can use either a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (1-Node) or a vSphere 6.7 Update 3/vSphere 7.0+ environment.

The most notable change with this version is actually within TKG itself which now uses kube-vip to replace the functionality that the HAProxy VM used to provide. What this means when deploying either a TKG Management or Workload Cluster is that you will need to specify an IP Address which will be used for the Virtual IP endpoint of the K8s Cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.10


Using the TKG Demo Appliance, you can deploy both v1.19.1 and v1.18.8 K8s Clusters. To exercise a TKG Cluster upgrade workflow, you just have to run these three simple commands:

export VSPHERE_TEMPLATE=photon-3-kube-v1.18.8_vmware.1
tkg create cluster tkg-cluster-01 --plan=dev --kubernetes-version=v1.18.8+vmware.1 --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.11
tkg upgrade cluster tkg-cluster-01


There has been a lot of demand for TKG on VMware Cloud on AWS, so that is where I have spent the bulk of my testing not to mention where it was originally developed. You can also deploy the TKG Demo Appliance in an on-premises vSphere environment running 6.7 Update 3 or newer.

[Read more...]

Categories // Kubernetes, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Tanzu, vSphere 6.7, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere 6.7, vSphere 7.0

OVFTool 4.4.1 - Upload OVF/OVA from URL using upcoming "pull" mechanism

10.14.2020 by William Lam // 12 Comments

I was helping a fellow colleague yesterday with an OVA question and I came to learn about an upcoming feature in the popular OVFTool utility that would allow for a new method of uploading a remote OVF/OVA to either a vCenter and/or ESXi endpoint.

Historically, when you upload an OVF/OVA whether that is stored locally or remotely from a URL, the data path will actually transfer through the system running the OVFTool between the source and destination, which is ultimately the ESXi host which performs the actual download. Although the OVF/OVA data is not actually stored on your local system, the traffic is proxied through your system and can add an unnecessary hop if the remote OVF/OVA URL can directly be accessed by ESXi host.

A new --pullUploadMode flag has been introduced in the latest OVFTool 4.4.1 release, which will allow ESXi host to directly download (pull) from the remote OVF/OVA URL, assuming it has connectivity. In addition to version of OVFTool, you will also need to have either ESXi 6.7 or 7.0 environment for this new feature to work.

Disclaimer: Although this feature is available in latest OVFTool release, it is still under development and should be considered a Beta feature in case folks are interested in trying it out.

Since the ESXi host is directly downloading from the remote source, there are two additional security verification that has already been implemented. The first is an additional vSphere Privilege called "Pull from URL" which is under the vApp section. Without this, you will get a permission denied error.


Secondly, in addition to specifying the new CLI option, you will also need to provide another flag called --sourceSSLThumbprint which should include the SHA1 hash of endpoint hosting the OVF/OVA. This is an additional verification to ensure the validity of the server hosting the OVF/OVA.

Here is an example of deploying my latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 Virtual Appliance OVA which is remotely hosted. The quickest way to obtain the SHA1 thumbprint is simply opening browser to based URL which is https://download3.vmware.com/


You will need to replace the space with ":" (colon), so the final string should look like BA:C6:4E:D9:AD:D4:53:B5:86:5A:5D:70:36:CF:89:93:D1:6C:F9:63

Note: The SHA1 thumbprint example shown above is only valid as of Oct 2020, as TLS certificates are replaced periodically, the SHA1 hash will change.

Here is an example OVFTool command to deploy from the remote URL

ovftool \
--X:logFile="ovftool.log" \
--acceptAllEulas \
--allowAllExtraConfig \
--allowExtraConfig \
--noSSLVerify \
--sourceSSLThumbprint="B2:52:9E:4D:57:9F:EA:53:4D:A0:0B:7F:D4:7E:55:91:56:C0:64:BB" \
--name="Nested-ESXi-7.0-Update-1-Appliance" \
--datastore=sm-vsanDatastore \
--net:"VM Network"="VM Network" \
--pullUploadMode \
https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/nested-esxi/Nested_ESXi7.0u1_Appliance_Template_v1.ova \
'vi://*protected email*:[email protected]/Primp-Datacenter/host/Supermicro-Cluster'

If we switch over to the vSphere UI, we should see a new task called "Download remote files" which indicates the new pull method is being leveraged. One thing to note is that because ESXi is now performing the download directly, progress may not be known by the OVFTool client, since it is not longer the source for the data transfer. Another thing to be aware of is that OVFTool itself has built-in retry logic in case there is a slight interruption during the data transfer with the current mechanisms. In the "pull" scenario, there is no retry by ESXi and so depending on connectivity, its possible deployments can fail and complete re-transfer would be required.

Categories // Automation, OVFTool, vSphere 6.7, vSphere 7.0 Tags // ovftool, vSphere 6.7, vSphere 7.0

Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script

10.13.2020 by William Lam // 16 Comments

After sharing a sneak peak of my updated vSphere with Tanzu Automated Lab Deployment script on Twitter, I have been receiving non-stop requests on when the script will be available. It took a bit longer to finish off the documentation, creating the script was actually the easy part 😛

In any case, I am happy to finally share the automated script for deploying the new vSphere with Tanzu "Basic" which is included as part of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 is now available! You can find full details at the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-basic-automated-lab-deployment

In addition to the deployment instructions on the Github repo, I have also included a sample walkthrough which includes both deploying the vSphere with Tanzu environment as well as enabling Workload Management on the vSphere Cluster, which is not part of the automated deployment script.

I will also be updating my existing Workload Management PowerCLI Module to incorporate the new requirements for automating the enablement of Workload Management for a vSphere with Tanzu Basic Cluster. Together with this script, you will now have the ability to deploy vSphere with Tanzu end-to-end in under 1hr time!

More details will be shared in a later blog post and I hope folks enjoy the script, it was a ton of work!

Categories // Automation, Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0 Tags // vSphere 7.0 Update 1, vSphere Kubernetes Service

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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