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Disabling vSphere with Tanzu does not delete NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) Service Engine (SE) VMs

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While working on some automation to deploy a vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment that has been configured with vSphere with Tanzu and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB), I noticed that when you disable Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster, the two NSX ALB Service Engine (SE) VMs were still left behind.


It turns out that this behavior is due to a default setting within NSX ALB that will NOT automatically delete the SE's in the case there is a scaled up event which would then cause a re-deploy to happen. Instead, by default it is configured to wait 120 minutes (2hrs) before cleaning up.

If you wish to change this behavior, you can login to NSX ALB UI and navigate to Infrastructure->Service Engine->Advanced and update the "Delete Unused Service Engines After" to your desired value. Please note, that the shortest time interval to wait is 1 minute and if you set it to 0, it means the SE's VMs not be deleted.


After saving this change, the next time you disable Workload Management, the SE VMs will automatically get cleaned based on the time interval you had configured.

Automating default admin password change for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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Over the weekend I got a chance to deploy my first vSphere with Tanzu environment using the new NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) which I had shared on Twitter.

This was also my first time getting exposed to NSX ALB (formally AVI Networks) and this detailed blog post from my buddy Cormac Hogan was instrumental in helping me quickly get started and get into the specific configurations needed for a two network design with vSphere with Tanzu. For me personally, there were just too many different configuration pages a user needed to navigate to and context switching between them made it non-intuitive for a new user like myself. After going through this once, I knew Automation was the next step for me and this was also an opportunity to try out the NSX ALB API, which I also have never used before.

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Quick Tip - Install Metallb as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

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There have been a few questions in the community asking about service load balancer options when using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). Out of the box, TCE does support NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB), but most folks will probably not have access to NSX-ALB or the resources to set that up. As an alternative, either kube-vip and metallb can be used and they are completely free and easy to setup.

I personally have used metallb before and I definitely recommend it for its ease of use and setup. You can find the instructions below on setting up metallb with TCE along with a sample kubernetes (k8s) application to verify its functionality.

Note: Scott Rosenberg is also doing some interesting stuff with Carvel that would enable easy deployment of kube-vip and metallb in TCE. I am hoping I will get some time to take a look at this setup as I think this would be great user experience for TCE just like you can install other k8s applications.

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