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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.1

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Check out the newest release of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling which includes the following new features:

  • Support for the latest TKG 1.2.1 release
  • Support for TKG Workload Cluster upgrade workflow from Kubernetes v1.18.10 to v1.19.3
  • Updated embedded Harbor to use self-sign TLS certificate

One of the biggest feature I was excited for in the new TKG 1.2.1 release was support for an external container registry that was configured with a self-signed TLS certificate. Previously, TKG only supported container registries that were configured with a trusted CA signed certificate and that made it difficult for proof of concept/testing but also for environments that were air-gapped.

With previous releases of the TKG Demo Appliance, a valid TLS certificate was acquired from Let's Encrypt (LE) with the help of my good friend Ryan Johnson who owns the domain rainpole.io. The one downside to LE-based certificates is the short expiry period, which is every 90 days. This meant that any TKG Demo Appliance deployed after the expiry would stop functioning due to the certificate no longer being valid. Although I have been able to manage this by updating the appliance roughly every 90 days, usually in-conjunction with new release of TKG, it was less than ideal.

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Record and Replay vSphere Inventory using govc and vcsim 

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Happy New Year! 🥳

I wanted kick off 2021 with something I had just learned about right at the end of 2020 which I think this will be useful going into the new year for a number of different use cases. Back in 2017, I wrote about a new and lighter weight version of the vCenter Simulator (vcsim) which had been developed as part of the govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go) project. Since then, the govmomi project has grown exponentially and is now integral to a number of popular open source projects such as Packer builder for vSphere, Terraform provider for vSphere and Kubernetes Cluster API for vSphere (CAPV) to just name a few.

Govmomi is also heavily used internally by VMware for both development and testing purposes. In fact, it has been used to build a number of new VMware features such as the vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) solution and most recently the vSphere with Tanzu capability that was introduced in vSphere 7.0.

Getting back to vcsim, this has been an invaluable tool for both our VMware developers but also the general VMware community. The ability to "simulate" a mocked vSphere environment with a basic inventory can be extremely useful for learning about the vSphere API and interacting with this endpoint using any vSphere SDK including PowerCLI. For automation folks, this can be useful for designing and creating your scripts in an offline mode before testing it against a real environment. For folks building 3rd party solutions that includes a visual interface, this is an easy way to test out your UI and ensure that there are no issues for large vSphere inventories which can be difficult to validate in a development environment.

Simulating a fake vSphere inventory is great, but it also has its limitations. There are so many unrealized use cases if you could capture a real vSphere inventory and then replay that back using vcsim. Just think about a bug reproduction use case and being able to share a real vSphere inventory with a development or QA team without needing to provide them direct access to the production environment?

In my opinion, this was the missing key feature from the original vcsim. To my surprise, this functionality was actually added to govc/vcsim earlier last year and I was quite happy with its implementation! Let's now take a closer look at how the record and replay functionality of govc/vcsim works.

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GPU passthrough with ESXi on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1

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The expandability of the Apple 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) has been the primary reason VMware customers have been so excited for this new platform for virtualizing macOS on ESXi. The most common request that I hear from customers is for GPU passthrough.

Although VMware does not officially support GPU passthrough, even for the existing Apple hardware systems on the VMware HCL, this has been a topic I have been keeping an eye out on, especially from what the VMware community is doing in this space.

My intention for this blog post is to provide a resource for the community on capturing the success and failures when attempting GPU passthrough on a 2019 Mac Pro. For those interested and have capable hardware, you may want to start with the VMware HCL for GPU passthrough devices listed under Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA). This may be your best chance to successfully passthrough a GPU that will be recognized by either a macOS or Linux/Windows guest operating system.

If you would like to share your experiences, feel free to leave a comment or reach out by filling the contact form.

Disclaimer: Although ESXi installs and runs on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 it is currently not certified on the VMware HCL. There are no timelines on the certification due to challenges with COVID-19.

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