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Packer reference for PhotonOS Arm NFS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties for ESXi-Arm

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In case the title was not descriptive enough, I was curious if I could build an Arm Virtual Appliance (OVA) using OVF properties that would allow for all sorts of interesting guest customizations which I have blogged about before here, here, here and here using x86 PhotonOS as a reference implementation. My idea for this actually pre-dated the release of the ESXi on Arm Fling, but it was only until recently with support for VMware Tools for Photon OS Arm, was I able to finally piece together this solution.

It was also neat to see that I could build an Arm OVA using x86 tooling (Packer and OVFTool) which ran on my desktop and you simply needed an ESXi-Arm host. This really goes to show the level of compatibility from a management and vSphere API point of view that an ESXi-Arm host behaves just like a standard x86 ESXi host!

To demonstrate a more interesting use case than just basic network customization for the ?first? Arm OVA, I thought it would be useful to setup a simple NFS appliance that would take input from the user such the size of the exported volume (default 60GB) and then the name of the mount point. Upon first boot up, there is a guest customization script that would read in the OVF properties and configure the networking, OS password and NFS server configuration which you can certainly use to host your Arm VMs.

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Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

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As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

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Customizing Kubernetes cluster template (Dev/Prod) plans in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.2

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With previous releases of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), if you needed to apply special OS customizations that were applied to the deployed Control Plane and Worker Node VMs, such as injecting commands to handle network proxy or dealing with insecure container registry, your only option was to hand edit the default TKG Dev/Prod YAML templates. Not only was this error prone but because the templates can change from each release, it was difficult to manage and test until you attempted a deployment.

One of the newest features with the release of TKG 1.2 is official support for customizing the Kubernetes (K8s) Cluster Templates Plans using YTT (YAML Templating Tooling) which allows users to provide custom data that can then be patched/overlay to an existing YAML file. YTT itself is part of a larger toolset for building, creating and configuring deployments for K8s called Carvel. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) that YTT uses was not exactly intuitive but since the official TKG documentation had an example to start with, I was able to mostly figure my way through along with some tips from the #carvel Slack channel.

So what was I trying to do? I was working on updating my TKG Demo Appliance Fling to the latest 1.2 release and part of the setup required adding an entry to /etc/hosts file on all TKG VMs that are deployed. Instead of directly messing with the YAML templates, there is now a new "overlay" YAML file in ~/.tkg/providers/infrastructure-vsphere/ytt/vsphere-overlay.yaml which can be used to make such changes.

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