WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

Exploring the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service with Nested ESXi

by // 3 Comments

After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.

While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well, with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea 🤔

I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! 🤯

Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only. As of vSphere 8.x, you can now bring your own OVA/OVA for use with vSphere with Tanzu

[Read more...]

Stage Only & Stage and Install buttons disabled when updating to vSphere 7.0 Update 2a 

by // 6 Comments

vSphere 7.0 Update 2a was just released yesterday and it introduces the highly anticipated vSphere Virtual Machine Service which is part of the vSphere with Tanzu solution. Customers will now be able to get the exact same Kubernetes-native provisioning and management experience for deploying Virtual Machine based workloads along side their Kubernetes-based applications.

I was definitely interested in checking out this new feature and quickly navigated to my VCSA to start the upgrade and to my surprise, I noticed that both the Stage Only and Stage and Install buttons were disabled (grayed out) and preventing me from updating to the latest release!


I had filed an issue internally and after some troubleshooting, it looks like this may have been remnants caused by the previous Exception occurred in install precheck phase issue, which I had ran into during the update to 7.0 Update 2. Although I was initially pointed by Engineering to VMware KB 83145, it did not resolve the issue and I ran into a couple more errors like "Previous patching unsuccessful" and "Downloading RPM ...." messages within the VAMI UI as shown in the screenshots below

[Read more...]

Quick Tip - Disable vSphere with Tanzu prompt during TKG Management Cluster deployment

by // 1 Comment

When you attempt to deploy a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Management Cluster to a vSphere 7.0 environment, you may have noticed a message stating that you may want to enable the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGs) alternatively.


Running TKG and TKGs on vSphere 7.0 is fully supported and depending on your use case, you may want to enable one or the other. In either situation, you are always prompted with a question which you must answer before you can continue. Awhile back I was looking into whether there were any CLI options to override this behavior and simply answer in advanced but did not see anything in the CLI help menu.

I recently ran into this again and while asking around, I came to learn that were are indeed two (hidden) options that can be used to override and disable these prompts, which can be useful for unattended automation purposes. Although these options are hidden from the CLI help options, I am not exactly sure why this is the case, they are officially documented in the TKG documentation.

  • --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you wish to deploy a TKG Management Cluster on vSphere 7
  • --enable-tkgs-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you will be using the TKGs as your Management Cluster in vSphere 7

With this information, we can now pass in the --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 option as shown in the example below and you will no longer be prompted:

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.30.127 --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7