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Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

Automating kubectl-vsphere login for vSphere with Tanzu

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Before you can start deploying workloads to your vSphere with Tanzu Cluster, you need to first download the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl and then use that to login to your Supervisor Cluster which will generate a Kubernetes (K8s) context file that is stored in .kube/config

Here is an example of using the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl:

./kubectl-vsphere login --server=10.10.0.64 -u *protected email* --insecure-skip-tls-verify


For interactive sessions this is fine and upon successfully entering your password when prompted, you can switch to the correct K8s context to begin your workload deployment. For folks interested in automation, the one downside today is that the plugin does not provide a way to specify your password using either a command-line argument or reading from a configuration file.

I have actually seen this topic come up a few times both internally and externally for those wanting to automate the end to end deployment of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster and have gotten stuck on trying to figure a way around having to perform this required manual step.

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Complete vSphere with Tanzu homelab with just 32GB of memory!

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Since the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1, the demand and interests from the community on getting hands on with vSphere with Tanzu and the new simplified networking solution, has been non-stop. Most folks are either upgrading their existing homelab or looking to purchase new hardware that can better support the new features of the vSphere 7.0 release.

Although vSphere with Tanzu now has a flavor that does not require NSX-T which helps reduces the barrier on getting started, it still has some networking requirements which may not be easily met in for all lab environments. In fact, this was actually the primary reason I had started to look into this since my personal homelab network is very basic and I do not have nor want a switch that can support multiple VLANs, which is one of the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu.

While investigating for a potential solution, which included way too MANY hours of debugging and troubleshooting, I also thought about the absolute minimal amount of resources I could get away with after put everything together. To be clear, my homelab is comprised of a single Supermicro E200-8D which has 128GB of memory and that has served me well over the years and I highly recommend it for anyone that can fit that into their budget. With that said, I did set out with a pretty aggressive goal of using something that is pretty common in VMware homelabs which is an Intel NUC and with just 32GB of memory.

UPDATE (07/02/24) - As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you no longer have the ability to configure a single Supervisor Control Plane VM using the minmaster and maxmasters parameters, which have also been removed from /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml in favor of allowing users to control this configuration programmatically as part of enabling vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere with Tanzu). The updated vSphere IaaS API that allows users to specify number of Supervisor Control Plane VM will not be available until the next major vSphere release. While this regressed capability is unfortunate, it was also not an officially supported configuration and for users who wish to specify the number of Supervisor Control Plane VM using YAML method, you will need to use an earlier version of vSphere.

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Mapping between vSphere Container Volume to Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 using PowerCLI

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With the introduction of the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) 2.1, it looks like the previous method outlined by Cormac Hogan no longer applies when looking to map between a vSphere Container Volume (CV), which is a vSphere construct to the underlying Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), which is a Kubernetes construct.


William Arroyo, a K8s Solution Engineer recently noticed this behavior change and was asking if there was a way to use PowerCLI to still perform this look up. Given I had provided the original PowerCLI snippet on Cormac's blog, I was curious myself and since I had just rebuilt my vSphere with Tanzu environment, I figured I take a quick look to see where this new information might now be placed.

I did also want to mention that you can easily find this information using the vSphere UI by just clicking on the "Details" box next to the PVC


With the latest PowerCLI 12.1 release, we have a number of Cloud Native Storage (CNS) cmdlets that we can leverage and after a quick minute of poking around, this new information can be found using the Get-CnsVolume cmdlet and using the ExtensionData property to get more detailed properties.

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