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Heads Up - New image identifier required by VM Service in vSphere 8.0 Update 2

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I have been a huge fan of the VM Service capability, which has been an integral part of vSphere with Tanzu since its inception with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2. The VM Service had another major update last year that enabled further customization of workloads with the Sphere 8.0 release. What makes the latest update so exciting for vSphere with Tanzu users is that in vSphere 8.0 Update 2, the VM Service now officially supports deploying Microsoft Windows VMs and can also create VMs using all the rich VM configuration options that the vSphere platform supports!

I just got to try out the new VM Service feature yesterday and deployed a Windows OVF that I had built almost a year ago, which I have waiting for this feature to finally ship! 😀


I typically save my VM Service YAML manifest files so that I can easily reuse them but after performing the kubectl apply, I noticed nothing was being deployed and when I went to retrieve more details by running:

kubectl get vm -o yaml

I noticed the following error message:

message: 'Failed to get the VM''s image: windows-desktop-10'

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How to setup private GitLab on a Synology for Project Keswick?

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My recent blog post on setting up a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology gave me another idea that I had been thinking about regarding Project Keswick, which was announced back at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

If you have network connectivity to the Keswick Cloud Service, you can easily associate a Git repository, which is used for host configurations and workload deployments using GitOps using Github or even a privately managed Gitlab instance. For organizations that have additional compliance, security or air-gapped requirements, using the Keswick Cloud Service may not be an option. With that said, Project Keswick also supports an advanced deployment option where the association of a Git repository, such as GitLab, can also be accomplished without requiring the use of the Keswick Cloud Service.

While I have had experience using both Github as well as GitLab, which VMware uses to host its own code repository, I have actually never setup my own GitLab instance before. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity, especially with the ability to run additional add-on applications on a Synology.

After a bit of researching online, I found that GitLab can easily run as a Container workload and it just so happens that the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) has a package for running containers creatively called Container Manager and below are the step by step instructions for setting up GitLab running on Synology DSM 7.2.

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Building custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) for vSphere with Tanzu

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Right before going on PTO, I caught this really interesting tweet from my buddy Robert Guske that we now support building your own custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR), the Kubernetes software distributions that is signed and supported by VMware, which is typically provided by VMware through the online TKR Content Library.

While there are already a number of existing customizations that can be applied when deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes Workload Cluster (TKC), there may still be certain VM configurations that you would like to add, which is simply not possible today. In some of the customer requests, it can be as simple as changing the default size of the primary disk for a TKR, which is statically configured today as 20GB.

With this and many other use cases, it is nice to see that we now finally provide customers with a supported method to build their own custom TKR that might include additional customizations that is required by their organization for use with vSphere with Tanzu.

I recently got a chance to play with the new vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Image Builder tool, which is also an open source project from VMware and leverages the existing Kubernetes Image Builder, which I have also used before (see this blog post HERE for more details). While getting started, it took me a few tries but I eventually got it working after speaking with the Developers as I ran into a few issues.

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