Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

TKG Demo Appliance on VMware Cloud on DellEMC

11.05.2020 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

We have been getting interests from customers on wanting to run Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on our VMware Cloud on DellEMC (VMConDellEMC) offering and I was asked to see if my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance would also work on this VMware Cloud solution, especially as it works great on both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as existing premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or later environments.

With the help from our VMConDellEMC team, I got access to an SDDC and was able to validate that everything works as outlined in my TKG workshop guide. I have also updated the pre-req documentation to include a specific section for setting up VMConDellEMC SDDC, most of which is similiar to existing networking requirements. Once you have your customer uplink network configured to your VMConDellEMC SDDC, you will be able to reach the TKG Demo Appliance running on the NSX-T Segment. The thing about the setup is that TKG Demo Appliance is built in an air-gap fashion, so no internet access is required, which by default, the TKG CLI will assume. This is great way to quickly get started with TKG and playing with Kubernetes!

This was actually my first time using VMConDellEMC and I thought I would push the limits a bit and deploying a slightly larger TKG Workload Cluster than I normally would, especially since I got access to a 5-Node SDDC 😀

[Read more...]

NSX-T Edge OVF property to automatically join NSX-T Management Plane

04.20.2020 by William Lam // 2 Comments

After publishing my vSphere 7 with Kubernetes automation lab deployment script, I was looking at my NSX-T Edge code which leverages the vSphere VM Keystroke API to automate the joining of the the NSX-T Edge to the NSX-T Management Plane. This technique is used to avoid the need for SSH access to both NSX-T Edge and Manager which is the official VMware method as outlined in the documentation for configuring the Edge.

This is certainly unfortunate as most customers normally disable SSH by default and only enable it for troubleshooting/debugging purposes. As far as I know, there are no remote NSX-T APIs for configuring an NSX-T Edge that has been deployed outside of NSX-T Manager, which has its own implications.

I recently had a chance to revisit some research I had made a note of when I had first started working with NSX-T. While inspecting the NSX-T Edge OVA, I found several OVF properties that begin with mp which per the description was referring to the NSX-T Manager. At the time, I was not able to figure out which the required combination of keys and values. Taking a closer look and poking around the appliance and logs, I was able to finally figure out the correct combination which turned out to be easy, once you knew what it was expecting.

To help demonstrate this functionality, I have created a basic PowerCLI script edge-auto-join-nsxt-management-plane.ps1 which uses information from your already deployed NSX-T Manager to automatically deploy the desired number of NSX-T Edge(s) which will automatically join the NSX-T Management Plane upon initial setup.

The way this works is that the following four OVF properties must be filled as part of the NSX-T Edge deployment:

[Read more...]

vCenter Event Broker Appliance Updates - VMworld, Fling, Community & Open Source

11.21.2019 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

VMworld

At VMworld Barcelona, Michael Gasch and I had the privilege of presenting our #CODE1379E "If This Then That" for vSphere - The Power of Event Driven Automation session. The room was completely packed for a 9am session on Thursday after the big VMworld Party and we just wanted to thank everyone who attended the session and for those that came up to talk to us afterwards. We really had no idea how the session would be received but from the feedback, tweets and DM's we have received and continue to receive, it looks like the session really resonated with customers. In case you missed the session or could not attend VMworld, the session was recorded and is actually available for everyone to view. You just need to sign in with a free VMworld account.

VMware Fling

For those who attended the VMworld session in person, there was a nice surprise at the very end, which I think may be a VMworld first. Michael and I have been working on a side project in our spare time called the vCenter Event Broker Appliance or VEBA for short. This solution enables customers to easily create Event Driven Automation based on vCenter Server Events and rather than just showing off some cool demos, we wanted to leave the audience with something they can actually use right now!

With a little chant that was started by Emad Younis (this was NOT planned), the audience had spoken and wanted us to publish the planned VMware Fling which we were going to release in the coming days since we had just finished the process literally the week of VMworld. I figure its VMworld, this is what customers, partners and colleagues come here for and with a click of a button and crossing my fingers, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance Fling went LIVE.

[Read more...]