WilliamLam.com

vSphere Tag Attach/Detach events now in VMware Cloud on AWS

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The underlying products (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) that run within VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) are constantly being improved with new capabilities and enhancements. As a service, VMC is updated more frequently than a traditional on-premise environment and one huge benefit for our customers is that they get to access all the latest and greatest features of the platform!

Yesterday, I came to learn about some improvements that we had made to our vSphere Tagging infrastructure to start publishing vCenter Server Events for when a vSphere Tag is attached or detached from an inventory object such as a Virtual Machine. This has been a frequently requested feature by our customers, especially for auditing purposes and this also enables the ability to perform additional actions through the use of a vCenter Alarm.

UPDATE (10/13/20) - vSphere 7.0 Update 1 now includes vCenter Events for both vSphere Tag Attach/Detach operations. For complete list of out of the box vCenter Server Events, you can refer to this Github repo.

In the vSphere UI for a VMC vCenter Server, you can now see these new tagging events by selecting the vCenter Server inventory object and then go to Monitor->Events and filter by "attached tag" or "detached tag".


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Automating complete HCX deployment and configuration to first cloud migration using PowerCLI

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PowerCLI 11.2.0, was just released last week and for a "dot" release, it includes a number of new capabilities and enhancements. One of the most exciting features for me personally was the introduction of the VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) PowerCLI module which I also had the pleasure of working on and providing early feedback to the HCX Engineering team. The new HCX module enables customers to use PowerCLI to now easily automate the HCX Fleet deployment (Interconnect, WAN Optimization and Network Extension) as well as perform bulk live migrations of  workloads between two HCX-enabled environments, with on-premises vSphere to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) being the most popular.

I have written a number articles on HCX Automation using both the HCX REST API and PowerCLI and with this latest PowerCLI module, I realized that we now have complete end-to-end automation with PowerCLI from the HCX OVA deployment to initial configuration and fleet deployment to your very first HCX vMotion! This is quite exciting as I know a number of folks have been asking about automating the fleet deployment, especially for enabling quick proof of concepts and quickly showing the value of HCX to our customers for moving large amount of workloads without any downtime.

Below, you will find a breakdown of the HCX setup which I have split into three sections, each section includes the respective PowerCLI sample code that can easily be adapted to your own environment. I look forward to seeing what customers do with the new HCX PowerCLI module and if you have any feedback, be sure to leave a comment or better yet, file a feature enhancement using the PowerCLI Feature Request Tool.

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Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

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Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

  • Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
  • NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
  • AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
  • govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.

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