Search Results for: tanzu

Useful Kubernetes Tricks/Tools

02.16.2021 by William Lam // 5 Comments

As you can see from my weekly Tweets, I am usually doing something that involves Kubernetes (K8s), whether that it is playing with Knative and our VMware Event Broker Application solution or doing some deep R&D research. I wanted to share some of the tips and tools that I have been using which has been helpful for me to better learn and interact with K8s whether that is using vSphere with Tanzu, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), KinD or other K8s distributions like k3s.

By no means is this a comprehensive list and I know there are many other collections including the curated Awesome Kubernetes project. If there are other useful K8s tricks or tools that you would like to share, feel free to leave a comment below.
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Retro DOS Games on Kubernetes

02.01.2021 by William Lam // 15 Comments

Over the weekend I discovered this really cool Github project by Paolo Mainardi called additronk8s which is a retro DOS game engine (using DOSBox) built as a Kubernetes (K8s) custom controller and implemented in Javascript. Having spent quite a bit of time last year building out our VMworld 2019 demo which ran a number of MSDOS games on ESX 3.0 running on VMware Cloud on AWS, I definitely had to give this project a try!

In addition to having some fun playing with K8s, this solution was also quite interesting from the techniques that were used, here is a description from Paolo's own words:

One of the goal of this project was to use just Kubernetes API without any external dependency (neither the storage), in fact is noteworthy that ConfigMaps are (ab)used as a persistent storage layer, using a simple technique of split/merge parts of files to save the games.

After poking around the repository, I found that it was not very intuitive to get started. In fact, it took me some time to figure out everything and lots of trial/error. I eventually got everything working and successfully deployed several DOS games to my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster which I had running in my homelab. Below are the detailed instructions on how to quickly get this solution stood up which just requires a vanilla K8s deployment.

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Record and Replay vSphere Inventory using govc and vcsim

01.04.2021 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Happy New Year! 🥳

I wanted kick off 2021 with something I had just learned about right at the end of 2020 which I think this will be useful going into the new year for a number of different use cases. Back in 2017, I wrote about a new and lighter weight version of the vCenter Simulator (vcsim) which had been developed as part of the govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go) project. Since then, the govmomi project has grown exponentially and is now integral to a number of popular open source projects such as Packer builder for vSphere, Terraform provider for vSphere and Kubernetes Cluster API for vSphere (CAPV) to just name a few.

Govmomi is also heavily used internally by VMware for both development and testing purposes. In fact, it has been used to build a number of new VMware features such as the vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) solution and most recently the vSphere with Tanzu capability that was introduced in vSphere 7.0.

Getting back to vcsim, this has been an invaluable tool for both our VMware developers but also the general VMware community. The ability to "simulate" a mocked vSphere environment with a basic inventory can be extremely useful for learning about the vSphere API and interacting with this endpoint using any vSphere SDK including PowerCLI. For automation folks, this can be useful for designing and creating your scripts in an offline mode before testing it against a real environment. For folks building 3rd party solutions that includes a visual interface, this is an easy way to test out your UI and ensure that there are no issues for large vSphere inventories which can be difficult to validate in a development environment.

Simulating a fake vSphere inventory is great, but it also has its limitations. There are so many unrealized use cases if you could capture a real vSphere inventory and then replay that back using vcsim. Just think about a bug reproduction use case and being able to share a real vSphere inventory with a development or QA team without needing to provide them direct access to the production environment?

In my opinion, this was the missing key feature from the original vcsim. To my surprise, this functionality was actually added to govc/vcsim earlier last year and I was quite happy with its implementation! Let's now take a closer look at how the record and replay functionality of govc/vcsim works.

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