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Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

Useful Kubernetes Tricks/Tools

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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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Record and Replay vSphere Inventory using govc and vcsim 

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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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Why am I seeing HTTP communication status 404 error when configuring vSphere with Tanzu & how to fix?

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One thing I love about the VMware Community is the constant sharing of knowledge and information on a regular basis. I always enjoy discovering new tricks and tidbits from the community, especially as it helps me refine my own knowledge and understanding of a given technology or solution.

My good buddy Ariel Sanchez cc'ed me on Twitter yesterday referencing a blog post by Paul Wilk about an issue he was observing in his Nested ESXi environment when configuring vSphere with Tanzu.

This was in regards to the dreaded 404 message displayed in the vSphere UI:

HTTP communication could not be completed with status 404


which is actually not unique to a Nested environment. In fact, this cryptic error message was observed even in the first release of vSphere with Tanzu which used to be called vSphere with Kubernetes with the release of vSphere 7.0 release.

Although Paul's conclusion on why his fixed work was not exactly correct, it was the fix itself that I was actually most interested in. Even with the initial vSphere 7.0 release, I had assumed this was just a cosmetic vCenter Server error message. It was not ideal, but like many other customers, I just ignored it as the enablement of Workload Management was still successful.

What helped me connect the dots was the fact that Paul solved the problem by disabling the ESXi firewall, which meant this was actually an ESXi issue. Given this was related to the OVF deployment, I immediately knew what this was actually referring to and is related to an earlier blog post I had shared about a new feature that would allow ESXi to "pull" remote OVF/OVA files from a HTTP(s) endpoint. In this case, it was not OVFTool driving the deployment but rather vCenter Server and the Content Library service, which is also responsible for OVF/OVA deployments.

It turns out that as part of deploying the Supervisor VMs, instead of using the typical "push" method for uploading an OVA, vCenter is instructing the ESXi host to "pull" the OVA files remotely which are actually hosted on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) itself. What ends up happening is that because ESXi does not have the correct port in which the OVA is hosted on the VCSA, the "pull" method fails and it automatically falls back to the old "push" method. This is why you see the error message and then progress is immediately progressing.

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