WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: Intel NUC

Can you really deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) without DNS and NTP?

by // 12 Comments

The simple answer is Yes. Now, you might be wondering why anyone would want to put themselves through the pain without setting up proper DNS and NTP?

Well, not all environments have the luxury of having either outbound connectivity and/or access to basic infrastructure services like DNS and NTP. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are customers out there that need to operate in very unique and constrained environments. One such example of this is typically from customers that need to deploy vSphere in a "dark site" where local infrastructure services like DNS and NTP are not available.


I recently re-validated this deployment model using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release running on an Intel NUC 11 which had no outbound connectivity and it was only connected to my laptop, which also had no outbound connectivity or access to DNS or NTP. Since this question recently came up from a customer who was looking to automate this, so I ran through the deployment workflow using the VCSA CLI Installer but this should also be possible with VCSA UI Installer as the same options are supported.

OK, so how do you make this work?

[Read more...]

Minimum vSphere edition & features for Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

by // 7 Comments

There have been a number of questions that have been raised by the community regarding the specific vSphere features and/or editions that is needed to deploy Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). I honestly thought I knew the requirements quite well myself but when it came to specific vSphere Editions, it made me second guess on what features TCE actually required for functionality.

I decided to deploy a brand new setup using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 (vCenter Server and ESXi) release, which was all deployed onto a single 11th Gen Intel NUC. Below are my findings which I will share back with TCE folks and enhance our documentation. Ultimately, you just need access to a vCenter Server that is managing an ESXi host which can be a standalone host or one that is within a vSphere Cluster. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone that wishes to get started.

vSphere Version:

  • As the official TCE documentation states, vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or newer is needed and this is primarily because that is the initial release that incorporates our vSphere CSI driver

vSphere Edition (minimum):

  • vCenter Standard and vSphere Standard
  • vCenter Essentials and vSphere Essentials Plus

Note: I did not have access to a vSphere Essential license but I am pretty confident it should also work.

vSphere Features:

  • Both vSphere HA and DRS is NOT required

Single node Supervisor Control Plane VM for vSphere with Tanzu now possible in vSphere 7.0 Update 3

by // 8 Comments

Last year, when vSphere with Kubernetes (original name of what is now vSphere with Tanzu) was first released, I had shared a process on how to deploy a minimal setup including a detailed write-up for setting up vSphere with Tanzu on an Intel NUC with just 32GB of memory.

I am always looking for ways to simplify and ease the consumption of various VMware technologies within a homelab and I was pretty happy with the tweaks that I could make to reduce the amount of resources needed to run vSphere with Tanzu. Instead of needing to deploy three Supervisor Control Plane VMs, the modification to the vSphere with Tanzu configuration, allowed me to deploy just two Supervisor Control Plane VMs. It was unfortunate that deploying only a single Supervisor Control Plane VM at the time was not possible due to a known issue.

While deploying a pre-release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3 in one of my lab environments, I was going through the process of tweaking the vSphere with Tanzu configuration before enablement and I figure why not try the one node setting, in case it was fixed 🤷 I honestly was not expecting it to work since there was an internal bug that was filed awhile back and I had not seen the bug closed. To my complete surprise, vSphere with Tanzu enabled successfully and there was just a single Supervisor Control Plane VM!


It turns out that someone from Engineering must have fixed the issue and a single Supervisor Control Plane VM is now possible with the upcoming release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3! 🥳

UPDATE (07/02/24) - As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you no longer have the ability to configure a single Supervisor Control Plane VM using the minmaster and maxmasters parameters, which have also been removed from /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml in favor of allowing users to control this configuration programmatically as part of enabling vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere with Tanzu). The updated vSphere IaaS API that allows users to specify number of Supervisor Control Plane VM will not be available until the next major vSphere release. While this regressed capability is unfortunate, it was also not an officially supported configuration and for users who wish to specify the number of Supervisor Control Plane VM using YAML method, you will need to use an earlier version of vSphere.

To change the settings, you will need to SSH to the VCSA and edit the following configuration file /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml and search for minmasters and maxmasters and change the value from 3 to 1.

minmasters: 1
maxmasters: 1

For the changes to go into effect, you will need to restart the vSphere with Tanzu service which is listed as wcp by running the following command:

service-control --restart wcp

In addition, for homelab purposes, you may also want to change the controlplane_vm_disk_provisioning parameter, which defaults the Supervisor Control Plane VM to Thick provisioned rather than Thin, which many folks use in their labs.

controlplane_vm_disk_provisioning: "thin"