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Closer look at vSphere Permissions for vSphere with Tanzu 

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Questions regarding vSphere Permissions for vSphere with Tanzu has been frequently brought up more lately and the majority of questions that I have seen, has primarily focused on the behavior of the vSphere UI Inventory. After taking a closer look and experimenting with a few permutations within my lab, I realized that most folks were simply focusing on what they were most familiar with, which is using the vSphere UI to interact with vSphere.

Although vSphere with Tanzu is tightly integrated with vSphere and the vSphere UI is certainly a primary interface, it is certainly not the only interface nor is it always the interface for end users like a developer. Depending on the needs of your end users and how your organization wishes to grant access to a vSphere Namespace, there are actually a few options that are available to you. In fact, users can interact with vSphere with Tanzu without ever logging into the vSphere UI and that is completely valid and may even be desirable for some organizations.

Note: The custom kubectl plugin for vSphere (kubectl-vsphere) which is needed to interact with vSphere with Tanzu can be downloaded by simply opening a browser (or use wget) to following URL: https://[SUPERVISOR-CLUSTER-IP]/wcp/plugin/[OS]-amd64/vsphere-plugin.zip, where OS is darwin, linux or windows (e.g. https://172.17.33.33/wcp/plugin/darwin-amd64/vsphere-plugin.zip)

Below are the results of my testing using the various vSphere Roles and Groups including the various behavior across the different consumption interfaces including the vSphere UI. To help better illustrate the results, I am also using some example personas, these are purely used as an example and may differ based on your organizational needs.

Persona: VI/Cloud Admin

In this scenario, the user is a vSphere Administrator and has the following memberships:

  • vSphere Role: Administrator
  • vSphere SSO Group: Administrators
  • vSphere Namespace: SSO User and/or Active Directory User

The user will be able to view and manage all vSphere infrastructure including the vSphere Namespaces and the respective workloads including TKG Workload Clusters and/or VMs via the VM Service.

Here is a summary of this users access:

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Exploration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-vCenter Server templating using YTT

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The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.

While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment 😮 and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!

This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.

After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressions  🙂

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How to modernize your vSphere Alarm actions using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)?

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The VMware Event Broker Application/Appliance (VEBA) solution makes it extremely easy for customers to build Event-Driven Automation that can react to over 1800+ vSphere-based Events using your favorite scripting or programming language of choice that includes PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python and Go to just name a few.

The benefits of VEBA can extend beyond just vSphere Events and can also be used with both new and existing vSphere Alarms. In fact, vSphere Alarms is just another a type of vSphere Event, which then makes it super easy to work with if you are already familiar with VEBA. Similar to the "triggers" that are supported with vSphere Events, the available options for extensibility in vCenter Server is super limited.


In addition to the limited options for extending vCenter Server, there are also valid security concerns with resource utilization and opening up access to run arbitrary scripts directly on the VCSA, which we all know is a bad practice for so many reasons. What if we could easily extend the actions to a vSphere Alarm to send notifications to Slack or Microsoft Teams, automatically file an IT Ticket or run specific automation or remediations tasks!?

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