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Updates to Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance for vSphere 7.0 Update 3

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vSphere 7.0 Update 3 officially GA'ed this morning and I am happy to share a quick that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance (OVA and Content Library) has also been updated to support the latest release. In addition, I have also published an update to the ESXi 7.0 Update 2a Virtual Appliance as there was an issue that prevented it from working with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x release.

Nested ESXi OVA:

Nested ESXi Content Library:

For prior ESXi versions, you can check out http://vmwa.re/nestedesxi

Configuring NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS

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One of the exciting new features of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) 1.3 release is the support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) as a Layer-4 load balancer solution for your Kubernetes (K8s) based workloads. Most recently, there were a couple of customer inquiries asking whether TKG 1.3 and NSX ALB is supported on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and the answer is yes!


I suspect part of the reason on why this question came up is that it may have been difficult to find a clear support stance for this configuration and although there is some documentation in the AVI Portal for installing NSX ALB on VMConAWS, it certainly was not easy to find. I personally also found the instructions to a be on the lighter side after reading through a few times. Since I already had my TKG Demo Appliance Fling deployed in my VMConAWS SDDC, it was easy enough to un-deploy my existing TKG Management Cluster and set it up with NSX ALB. You can find the detailed instructions below and although the setup of NSX ALB and TKG is similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment as recently documented by Cormac Hogan, there are still some subtle differences, especially if you are not placing both TKG and NSX ALB systems all on the same single, which you may find in demos 🙂

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Using Packer vsphere-iso provider with VMware Cloud on AWS

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I am a huge fan of HashiCorp Packer, which makes automating Virtual Machine images for vSphere including OVF, OVA and vSphere Content Library Templates extremely easy. Packer supports two vSphere Providers, the first being vmware-iso which requires SSH access to an ESXi host and the second called vsphere-iso which does not require ESXi access but instead connects to vCenter Server using the vSphere API, which is the preferred method for vSphere Automation.

I started working with Packer and the vmware-iso several years ago and because there is not 100% parity between the two vSphere providers, I have not really looked at the vsphere-iso provider or even attempted to transition over. I was recently working on some automation within my VMware Cloud on AWS(VMConAWS) SDDC and since this is a VMware managed service, customers do not have access to the underlying ESXi hosts nor SSH access. I thought this would be a good time to explore the vsphere-iso provider and see if I can make it work in a couple of different networking scenarios.

For customers that normally establish either a Direct Connect (DX) or VPN (Policy or Route-based) from their on-premises environment to their SDDC, there is nothing special that needs to be setup to use Packer. However, if you are like me who may not always have these types of connectivity setup or if you wish to use Packer directly over the internet to your SDDC, then some additional configurations will be needed.

UPDATE (04/12/22) - A floppy option can now be used with Photon OS to host the kickstart file, see this Github issue for an example.

Packer Connectivity Scenarios

In both scenarios below, DX/VPN is not configure or relied upon to the VMConAWS SDDC.

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