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Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

Useful Interactive Terminal and Graphical UI Tools for Kubernetes

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I recently ran an internal hands-on workshop where I demonstrated to our field, marketing, support and engineering on just how easy it is to deploy and manage Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Clusters running on VMware Cloud on AWS. While developing the lab which has been several weeks in the making, I did not want to assume everyone was familiar with Kubernetes (K8s) and as part of the workshop, I thought it would be useful to include some additional utilities that would provide a better lab experience for those that are just getting started in their K8s journey.

I included tools like bat, kube-ps1 and Octant as an example and the weekend before the workshop, I came to learn about a really neat terminal-based UI tool called kubelive and I knew I had to include that in the workshop. Interestingly, after the workshop, several folks shared with me that they had not heard of this tool either and others on Twitter had the same feedback. Given the level of interests with K8s in the VMware community, especially with the launch of vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific), I thought it might be useful to share some of the terminal-based and graphical UI tools that I had been evaluating and learning about.

As of writing this blog post, my current two favorites is Octant for a graphical-based UI (browser) and K9s for a terminal-based UI.

Octant

Octant is a browser-based UI aimed at application developers giving them visibility into how their application is running. I also think this tool can really benefit anyone using K8s, especially if you forget the various options to kubectl to inspect your K8s Cluster and/or workloads. Octant is also a VMware Open Source project and it is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (including ARM) and runs locally on a system that has access to a K8S Cluster. After installing Octant, just type octant and it will start listening on localhost:7777 and you just launch your web browser to access the UI.

One thing I really like about Octant is how easy it is to switch context between different K8s Cluster with a simple drop down along with namespace filtering which is quite helpful in narrowing down a specific deployments, usually for informational or troubleshooting purposes.


Most of my workflows generally involves a specific K8s pod and the Resource View tab is super handy to give me a quick overview of the different resources that is associated whether that is a deployment, secret, service, etc.


The YAML tab beats using cat and bat, especially for really large and complex deployments and you can search right in the browser.
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How to fix "extensions/v1beta1" & missing required field "selector" for Yelb Kubernetes application? 

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As you can see from my recent tweets, I have been spending some time with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically Cluster API Provider vSphere (CAPV) and deploying upstream Kubernetes (K8s) running on VMware Cloud on AWS 🙂

After successfully deploying my first K8S Workload Cluster, I knew the first k8s application that I had to deploy on my shiny new K8s Cluster was Massimo Re Ferre' and Andrea Siviero famous "Yelb" application which I had demonstrated several years ago running on VMware PKS. In fact, I had even deployed it recently (late last year) in one of my Project Pacific cluster without any issue, so I was surprised when I ran into some challenges as you can see from the title of the blog post.

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Application Discovery in vSphere with VMware Tools 11

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The holidays are just around the corner and hopefully everyone is taking some time off to spend with their families, I know I certainly will! As I start to wind down 2019, I like to use this time catch up on things in my backlog that I was not able to get to in the year. This can range from blog posts that I still need to read, to session recordings that I have attempted to watch but have only made it half way to random notes on topics to potentially investigate in.

When VMware Tools 11 was released back in September, I had noticed an interesting feature that was delivered as part of that release:

Added appInfo to publish information about running applications inside the guest.

I thought this might be something worth looking at when I found some time. One of the nice benefits of having VMware Tools de-coupled from a specific vSphere release is that VMware can now ship additional GuestOS capabilities to customers without requiring them to upgrade the entire vSphere infrastructure, which brings us to the new appInfo feature.

AppInfo is a new plugin within VMware Tools that enables the collection of the "raw" running application processes within a GuestOS. Once enabled, this information is then published into new VM guestinfo property called guestinfo.appinfo which can then be consumed by standard vSphere Automation Tools. This has been one of the most common VM Automation questions I have received over the years from customers and we can now provide additional insights to our administrators on the underlying applications and its version running within a Virtual Machine.

By default, this new AppInfo capability is enabled by default after installing VMware Tools 11 and is supported with both Windows and Linux GuestOS. If you wish to disable this feature, you can find the instructions here. Below is a Windows Server 2016 which I have Active Directory among other applications running which has the appInfo collection enabled.


Once enabled, the default collection period runs every 30 minutes which can be changed following the instructions mentioned earlier. To make this easier to consume, I wrote a quick PowerCLI function called Get-VMApplicationInfo.ps1 which expects a VM object and then retrieves the appInfo details. As part of the output, the results also includes the last discovered time along with an update counter which can be used to track the number of times the collection has ran since enabling.

UPDATE (08/03/20) - Just learned that the latest like VMware Tools 11.1 now includes supports for appInfo capability for Linux GuestOSes. Previously, this was only supported when using a Windows GuestOS but now customers can have this same visibility into their Linux systems. Here is an example running my PowerShell function against the latest TKG Guest Cluster Control Plane VM which you can see both standard Linux processes along with container processes for Kubernetes.

One thing I did notice is that we simply return all instances of a given process and that may or may not be ideal depending on your use case. I have updated my function to include a boolean switch called -UniqueOnly which will automatically filter out the duplicates as shown in the screenshot below.


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