WilliamLam.com

Programmatically interact with the VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix

by // 2 Comments

I recently came across a really cool automation solution from Dale Coghlan who built a PowerShell module to interact with the VMware Configuration Maximum (Config Max) Tool.

Although the Config Max tool does not currently provide an API, there is still a way to interact with it programmatically. Behind the scenes, the application uses JSON for its payload which can then be retrieved programmatically using PowerShell or any other language for that matter to perform an HTTP GET. I also know the Config Max team quite well, as I had worked with them to incorporate the VMware Cloud on AWS configuration maximums which also required a few enhancements to the tool. If you have any feedback, feel free to drop a comment and I will be happy to share it with them and one of my first asks when I met the team, was to provide a public REST API 🙂

After sharing Dale's tweet, I saw a question about doing something similiar for the VMware's Product Lifecycle Matrix, which is a website that helps customers understand the support lifecycle of a given VMware product/solution. The product lifecycle site has also been recently revamped and although it also does not have a public API, using Chrome Developer Tools (super useful tool) to quickly inspect, it looks like you can also programmatically grab the payload which also happens to be using JSON 🙂

Disclaimer: The VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix does not provide a public API, this also means there are no guarantees or compatibility that the trick outlined below will continue to work going forward. This is why you want to have a public, documented and supported API.

[Read more...]

How to run Kali Linux on ESXi-Arm

by // 14 Comments

A few folks have been trying to get Kali Linux, a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing, to run on ESXi-Arm. Similiar to Raspberry Pi OS, the techniques outlined in this blog post can be used to convert the image-based system to a Virtual Machine that ESXi-Arm can then run natively. However, there is an issue when attempting to install grub during Step 16 where it can not locate an EFI partition.

With the help of Cyprien Laplace, we can now run Kali Linux on ESXi-Arm! You can find the detailed instructions below including installing VMware Tools for Kali Linux running on ESXi-Arm.

[Read more...]

How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?

by // Leave a Comment

This weekend I spent some time installing Knative, which is an open source framework that is built on top of Kubernetes. Knative is actually made up of two core components, serving and eventing. This quote from Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile really sums up Knative quite nicely:

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability.

There are a number of tutorials online for setting up Knative, most of which using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) for easy local development. Since I have been spending quite a bit of time lately with both our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Multi-Cloud solution, which both support deploying conformant and production grade Kubernetes (K8s) Clusters called a TKG Guest Cluster, I figure I might as well learn how to install Knative using these infrastructures.

The instructions below will be focus on deploying the Knative serving components. Once you have that setup, it is easy to deploy the eventing components which you can follow the official Knative documentation.

[Read more...]