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Useful Interactive Terminal and Graphical UI Tools for Kubernetes

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I recently ran an internal hands-on workshop where I demonstrated to our field, marketing, support and engineering on just how easy it is to deploy and manage Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Clusters running on VMware Cloud on AWS. While developing the lab which has been several weeks in the making, I did not want to assume everyone was familiar with Kubernetes (K8s) and as part of the workshop, I thought it would be useful to include some additional utilities that would provide a better lab experience for those that are just getting started in their K8s journey.

I included tools like bat, kube-ps1 and Octant as an example and the weekend before the workshop, I came to learn about a really neat terminal-based UI tool called kubelive and I knew I had to include that in the workshop. Interestingly, after the workshop, several folks shared with me that they had not heard of this tool either and others on Twitter had the same feedback. Given the level of interests with K8s in the VMware community, especially with the launch of vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific), I thought it might be useful to share some of the terminal-based and graphical UI tools that I had been evaluating and learning about.

As of writing this blog post, my current two favorites is Octant for a graphical-based UI (browser) and K9s for a terminal-based UI.

Octant

Octant is a browser-based UI aimed at application developers giving them visibility into how their application is running. I also think this tool can really benefit anyone using K8s, especially if you forget the various options to kubectl to inspect your K8s Cluster and/or workloads. Octant is also a VMware Open Source project and it is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (including ARM) and runs locally on a system that has access to a K8S Cluster. After installing Octant, just type octant and it will start listening on localhost:7777 and you just launch your web browser to access the UI.

One thing I really like about Octant is how easy it is to switch context between different K8s Cluster with a simple drop down along with namespace filtering which is quite helpful in narrowing down a specific deployments, usually for informational or troubleshooting purposes.


Most of my workflows generally involves a specific K8s pod and the Resource View tab is super handy to give me a quick overview of the different resources that is associated whether that is a deployment, secret, service, etc.


The YAML tab beats using cat and bat, especially for really large and complex deployments and you can search right in the browser.
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Really cool updates with OVFTool 4.4 and support for vSphere 7

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vSphere 7 has officially GA'ed this morning and with folks starting to download ESXi and the vCenter Server Appliance, do not forget about all the supporting tools such as the latest PowerCLI 12.0 release which includes a number of enhancement as well as the various vSphere Management and Automation SDKs.

One of my most frequently used tools on a daily basis, some times even more than PowerCLI is OVFTool which is now at version 4.4 which officially supports vSphere 7 but it also includes a number of really awesome enhancements and bug fixes. 

While looking over the OVFTool release notes, I noticed a few interesting tidbits that I thought was worth calling out:

OVF Tool now can upload disk files to the host in parallel, and download disk files from the host in parallel. OVA is unsupported. Parallelism is limited by the number of CPUs. See the --parallelThreads=N option in the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is a most welcome feature for customers with extremely large VMs where upload and/or downloads of OVAs can take a considerable amount of time as only a single CPU thread is used. With this feature, you can now enable multiple CPU threads with the --parallelThreads parameter which should really with performance! Even for smaller size VMs, you can still benefit if you have additional CPU resources to allocate and something I will be using going forward!

For multi-disk virtual machines, OVF Tool now includes the --multiDatastore flag to specify datastore per disk. See the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is another welcome feature for customers where you might have an OVA that contains multiple VMDKs and want to explicitly place them on specific datastore.

The ARM64 architecture on Linux is now supported.

Finally, I thought this was very interesting to see that OVFTool has been ported over to ARM64 for Linux which means we can run now run OVFTool on a Raspberry Pi or even an Amazon A1 EC2 Instance! This might come handy in the future and I wonder if OVFTool for ESXi would be the next logical step? 🙂

I highly recommend you check out the rest of the release notes as it contains many more enhancements and fixes, many of which I have reported from the community and/or by our customers. I think this is certainly one of the tools you can upgrade immediately as it has great backwards compatibility with older vSphere releases but you can also take advantage of all the new features mentioned above immediately. If there are other OVFTool improvements or enhancements you really would like to see, feel free to leave a comment along with the use case and I will past that on to Engineering.

Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

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With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

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