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Disabling vSphere with Tanzu does not delete NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) Service Engine (SE) VMs

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While working on some automation to deploy a vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment that has been configured with vSphere with Tanzu and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB), I noticed that when you disable Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster, the two NSX ALB Service Engine (SE) VMs were still left behind.


It turns out that this behavior is due to a default setting within NSX ALB that will NOT automatically delete the SE's in the case there is a scaled up event which would then cause a re-deploy to happen. Instead, by default it is configured to wait 120 minutes (2hrs) before cleaning up.

If you wish to change this behavior, you can login to NSX ALB UI and navigate to Infrastructure->Service Engine->Advanced and update the "Delete Unused Service Engines After" to your desired value. Please note, that the shortest time interval to wait is 1 minute and if you set it to 0, it means the SE's VMs not be deleted.


After saving this change, the next time you disable Workload Management, the SE VMs will automatically get cleaned based on the time interval you had configured.

Automating default admin password change for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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Over the weekend I got a chance to deploy my first vSphere with Tanzu environment using the new NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) which I had shared on Twitter.

This was also my first time getting exposed to NSX ALB (formally AVI Networks) and this detailed blog post from my buddy Cormac Hogan was instrumental in helping me quickly get started and get into the specific configurations needed for a two network design with vSphere with Tanzu. For me personally, there were just too many different configuration pages a user needed to navigate to and context switching between them made it non-intuitive for a new user like myself. After going through this once, I knew Automation was the next step for me and this was also an opportunity to try out the NSX ALB API, which I also have never used before.

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Quick Tip - Disable vSphere with Tanzu prompt during TKG Management Cluster deployment

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When you attempt to deploy a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Management Cluster to a vSphere 7.0 environment, you may have noticed a message stating that you may want to enable the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGs) alternatively.


Running TKG and TKGs on vSphere 7.0 is fully supported and depending on your use case, you may want to enable one or the other. In either situation, you are always prompted with a question which you must answer before you can continue. Awhile back I was looking into whether there were any CLI options to override this behavior and simply answer in advanced but did not see anything in the CLI help menu.

I recently ran into this again and while asking around, I came to learn that were are indeed two (hidden) options that can be used to override and disable these prompts, which can be useful for unattended automation purposes. Although these options are hidden from the CLI help options, I am not exactly sure why this is the case, they are officially documented in the TKG documentation.

  • --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you wish to deploy a TKG Management Cluster on vSphere 7
  • --enable-tkgs-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you will be using the TKGs as your Management Cluster in vSphere 7

With this information, we can now pass in the --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 option as shown in the example below and you will no longer be prompted:

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.30.127 --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7