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Automated Nested Lab Deployment on SDDC Part 1: VMware Cloud on AWS

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While preparing for this years VMworld, I had the unique opportunity to work across a number of VMware Cloud SDDC solutions such as VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS), Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS). During the the development of several demos, I found it invaluable to be able to deploy a Nested vSphere environment to validate my configurations prior to connecting our real vSphere on-premises infrastructure.

Putting aside VMworld demos, this can certainly be extended to other use cases such as accelerated pilots, proof of concepts and lab/development purposes. Customers have been leveraging Nested Virtualization technology for more than a decade plus now and it definitely makes sense that they would also want to do the same for certain workloads running within a VMware Cloud SDDC. With that said, Nested ESXi is not officially supported by VMware or on any other VMware-based platform.

As part of building my VMworld demos, I also had spent some time on creating some automation that would make it easier for me to re-deploy these Nested Lab environments and also being aware of the specific VMware Cloud SDDC solutions, so that I only have a single script to maintain. In case folks are also interested in being able to do this, you can follow this 4-part blog series which I will be kicking it off with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS).

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Kubernetes on ESXi-Arm using k3s

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The tiny form factor of a Raspberry Pi (rPI) is a fantastic hardware platform to start playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling. You can already do a bunch of fun VMware things like running a lightweight vSAN Witness Node to setting up basic automation environment for PowerCLI, Terraform and Packer to running rPI OS as VM, enabling some neat use cases like consolidating your physical rPI assets which might be running RetroPi and Pi-Hole which many home labbers are doing.

In addition to VMware solutions, its is also a great platform to learn and tinker with new technologies like Kubernetes (K8s) which I am sure many of you have been hearing about 🙂 Although our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) does not currently work with the ESXi-Arm Fling, I have actually been meaning to try out a super lightweight K8s distribution designed for IoT/Edge called k3s (pronounced k-3-s) which also recently joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox level.

k3s is supported on rPI and you normally would have multiple rPI devices to represent the number of nodes, for example if you want a basic 3-Node cluster, you would need three physical rPI devices. With ESXi-Arm, you can now create these nodes as VM, using just a single rPI. This opens up the door for all sorts of explorations, you can create HA cluster or try out more advanced features which might be more difficult if you needed several physical devices. If you mess up, you can simply re-deploy the VM without much pain or simply clone the VM.

In my setup, I am using 3 x Photon OS VMs. One for the primary node and two for k3s worker nodes. You can certainly install k3s on any other Arm-based OS including rPI OS (which can now run as a VM as mentioned earlier).


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List of VMware CLIs, SDKs & DevOps Tools

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A frequent question that I get asked from customers and new developers that are looking to get started with VMware Automation is what CLIs (command-line interfaces) or SDKs (programing/scripting specific languages) are available for them to use? I know it is not always easy to find out what is available on the VMware.com website and some times I even have trouble browsing for all the right information as it is located in many different places. I figure it would be helpful not only for myself but also for others if I put together a list of the various VMware CLIs, SDKs and even some of the new DevOps Tools that VMware has been working on that are available to our customers/developers and partners. I have also included a couple of community tools that I think are pretty interesting. If there are others that you think I should add to the list, feel free and leave a comment.

Note: This is by no means a comprehensive list of every single VMware product/toolkit as there are many many more, including gated SDKs specifically for our partner eco-system. For more details on those API/SDKs, be sure to check out the VMware Developer Center.

UPDATE (4/20) - VMware now has an Open Source page on Github http://vmware.github.io/

VMware Cloud Native Apps:

VMware DevOps Tools:

vCloud Air:

vCloud Director:

vSphere:

vRealize Management Suite:

VMware Community Tools: