WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

First look at the new Supermicro E302-12D (Ice Lake D)

by // 25 Comments

The Intel Xeon D embedded SoC product line is an amazing platform and has been extremely popular amongst VMware customers for VMware Homelabs and running workloads both in the Datacenter and at the Edge using kits like the Supermicro E200-8D and E300-9D to just name a few. While the E200-8D/E300-9D still remain popular, they are slowly coming up on their end of life support, Q1 2023 and Q1 2025 respectively.

Intel Ice Lake D is the first major architectural refresh of the Intel Xeon D product line, which is quite exciting for those looking to upgrade and take advantage of all the latest hardware capabilities this new platform as to offer! Two Ice Lake D kits that I am really excited for is the Supermicro E300-12D and E302-12D, both of which leverage the new Ice Lake D SoC. As a E200-8D owner, my only real nit pick is with the noise of the fans which can sound like a jet engine when using the stock fans. Although I have replaced the stock fans with the much quieter Noctua fans, under higher load the system is still audible and some in the community have also reported that it may still not be enough to cool system.

If I had to start all over again, I certainly would be looking at one of the new fanless kit from Supermicro! I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the upcoming Supermicro E302-12D system, a fanless Ice Lake D kit which has a similiar design to the existing E300-9D.

So here is your first sneak peak at this new Ice Lake D platform! 😀

[Read more...]

Quick demo videos of new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

by // Leave a Comment

VMware Cloud with Tanzu services is VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering that incorporates the vSphere with Tanzu technology delivered as a managed service as part of our VMware Cloud service offering. The initial release of Tanzu services is currently available on VMware Cloud on AWS, which will require SDDC version 1.16 and a request for enablement (contact your VMware account team) prior to deploying a new SDDC and enabling Tanzu services.

Note: In future, Tanzu services will also be enabled for existing SDDC (brownfield) as well as for other VMware Cloud Infrastructure Services, stay tuned!

Using Tanzu services with VMware Cloud is literally night and day when compared to installing and configuring vSphere with Tanzu yourself, which includes a number of other components to setup! As you would expect, as a service, it is simply a click of a button or API call and users only have to provide four basic input (technically three if you leave one of the recommended defaults) 🙂


Rather than talk about how the new Tanzu service works and some of the things you can do with the service right now, I figured I would record a few quick demo videos. You can find the Youtube playlist below if you wish to watch them all and I have also included a link to a Github repo for the demo examples that were used. Hope you enjoy!

[Read more...]

Publishing and consuming custom events with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

by // Leave a Comment

One of the really exciting features that will be included in the upcoming release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7 release (currently in Tech Preview) is the support for incoming webhooks! This will allow customers to easily build event-driven automation for non-vSphere based events and even non-VMware events while still maintaining a consistent consumption experience. If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming VEBA v0.7 release, Michael Gasch and myself will be doing a LIVE VMworld Session - VEBA Revolutions - Unleashing the Power of Event-Driven Automation #CODE2773 that you should definitely add to your schedule builder!

Webhook support can easily be enabled during the initial VEBA appliance deployment using a few new OVF properties or configured through the VMware Event Router configuration when deploying to an existing Kubernetes cluster using kubectl or Helm. Once the webhook endpoint is running, users can simply publish their custom events as a conformant CloudEvent and VEBA will ensure these custom events are immediately available for consumption by function authors. This means any product and/or service that can construct a custom HTTP payload including headers will be able to take advantage of this new VEBA feature! I also want to mention that this is NOT the only way to produce custom events that VEBA can ingest, but is certainly one simple way.

To help make this concept more concrete, I wanted to see how we could integrate VMware Cloud events into VEBA by using this new webhook mechanism and using the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway. Below is a diagram to help illustrate what is happens when a VMware Cloud event is generated and how it can be consumed by VEBA. The beauty of this type of a solution is the "Event Producer" does not have to know anything about the "Event Consumer" or how they might consume the data. The producer simply pushes events into VEBA and if there is a consumer who cares about a specific event and wishes to do something about it, they can create a function that will listen for a specific event(s) and perform an operation like sending to Slack as an example.

  1. Event is produced by VMware Cloud and pushed by the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW)
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed from VMware Cloud event by NGW service
  3. NGW forwards the custom CloudEvent to VEBA's webhook endpoint (https://[VEBA-FQDN]/webhook)
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents (e.g. SDDC Provisioned Event)

[Read more...]