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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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VMworld 2020 Demo - Voice activated workload migration to VMware Cloud SDDCs

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One of my favorite but also most stressful part of preparing for a VMworld session is creating the demos. Even with a "virtual" VMworld this year, I personally felt it was even more stressful than a physical VMworld.

I have been presenting with Emad Younis for a number of years now and every year, we always end up with crazy ideas without thinking through all the feasibility aspects. This year was certainly no different and while working on our demo this year, I was seriously questioning my sanity and even the actual return on investment (ROI), if such a thing exists!? ?

In case you have not watched our session, check out HCP132: Planes, Trains and Workload Mobility, you can watch it for free and see the full demo.


I was really floored by all the positive feedback that we had received from attendees which includes the VMworld survey but also on Twitter and Slack. This was one of my favorite tweet and response 😀

We really appreciate all the feedback and it definitely made up for some of the late nights where I was about to give up. I know a few of you were asking for more details about the demo and so this blog post will be focusing on some of the information I was not able to get to during the VMworld session.

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