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Can you really deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) without DNS and NTP?

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The simple answer is Yes. Now, you might be wondering why anyone would want to put themselves through the pain without setting up proper DNS and NTP?

Well, not all environments have the luxury of having either outbound connectivity and/or access to basic infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are customers out there that need to operate in very unique and constrained environments. One such example of this is typically from customers that need to deploy vSphere in a "dark site" where local infrastructure services like DNS and NTP are not available.


I recently re-validated this deployment model using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release running on an Intel NUC 11 which had no outbound connectivity and it was only connected to my laptop, which also had no outbound connectivity or access to DNS or NTP. Since this question recently came up from a customer who was looking to automate this, so I ran through the deployment workflow using the VCSA CLI Installer but this should also be possible with VCSA UI Installer as the same options are supported.

OK, so how do you make this work?

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Heads Up - No healthy upstream error with VEBA vSphere UI plugin with vSphere 7.0 Update 3

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After upgrading my homelab to vSphere 7.0 Update 3, I noticed that my VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) vSphere UI Plugin which is included as part of the VEBA Appliance was no longer functioning properly and would display no healthy upstream error message.


I initially thought this might be environmental, since I had just upgraded from lab from vSphere 7.0 Update 2d to 7.0 Update 3. I had reported the issue to our vSphere UI Engineers who built the VEBA UI plugin and while they were looking into the issue, we had another report from a VEBA user who also was hitting the same issue. Today, I got an update from Engineering and it looks like there was a regression in the Envoy service running in the VCSA which had caused this issue. This issue will be fixed in a future patch update for the VCSA, but in the mean time, VEBA users can apply the workaround outlined below.

Note: This workaround is required for vSphere 7.0 Update 3 or later. The issue has been fixed in vSphere 8.0 but if you are running any version of 7.0 Update 3 or newer, you will still need to apply this workaround.

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Quick Tip - Install kube-vip as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

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As a follow up to my recent blog post on how to install Metallb as a service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), I also wanted to take a look at the other alternative which is using kube-vip. As mentioned in the previous blog post, I also noticed that Scott Rosenberg, an awesome VMware/Tanzu customer who has also been contributing to the community, has been working on some really cool ways of deploying additional packages using the Carvel tooling.

Since I have not deployed kube-vip for use with service load balancer, I was curious on how easy it would be to setup and hint, it is pretty darn easy using Carvel packages! You can find the detailed instructions along with a sample kubernetes (k8s) application to verify load balancer configuration was setup correctly.

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