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How to create a custom Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Node OVA based on Photon OS Real Time Kernel?

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One really cool feature of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is the ability to bring your custom images (BYOI) which can then be used to deploy TKG Workload Clusters. To do so, customers will need to use Kubernetes (K8s) Image Builder tool to author new OVA images and then make TKG aware by updating the Tanzu Kubernetes Release (TKR) Build of Materials (BOM) configuration.

I had played around with Image Builder awhile back during the TKG 1.2 release and it definitely was not very easy to use. I have been meaning to kick the tires on Image Builder again as I know with the latest 1.3.x release, there have been a number of improvements. This week I saw an inquiry from my buddy Alan Renouf who was looking to see if there was a way to use the new Photon OS Real Time Kernel as a base image for a K8s-based application that he was working with that had requirements for the real time kernel.

Interestingly enough, there was another inquiry with a similiar customer request for their edge deployment and I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Image Builder again, which has been overhauled and the build process can be completely consumed as a Docker container, which definitely made things much easier than before. I also had never played with real time version of Photon OS, so this gave me a reason to try that out which was initially introduced with Photon OS 4.0 but it also looks like real time kernel was added to 3.0 recently, which is the version I had used to test.

Note: vSphere with Tanzu currently does not support the ability to bring your own image like TKG, I know this is something that has been asked about and is being considered in the future.

The BYOI process for TKG is comprised of two steps:

  • Create Custom TKG OVA
  • Update TKG with new TKR BOM

Although there are detailed documentation for this process, I still ran into a number of issues which I think the documentation could be improved with a complete working example rather than using generic values which lead to some interpretation, which I did not interpret correctly the first time through. After posting some questions in the Image Builder Slack Channel, I was able to finally connect the dots with the help from Scott Rosenberg, who I also knew, as a customer of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. Putting everything together, I figure it would be useful to document the process I took and hopefully this can benefit other customers looking to build and consume their own OVA images with TKG.

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Quick Tip - vmware-iso builder for Packer now supported with ESXi 7.0

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When vSphere 7.0 GA'ed earlier this year, one of the changes that I had noticed while going through the release notes was the removal of the VNC Server on ESXi. By default, this is disabled but users could enable it on a per-VM basis and connect to a specific VM using VNC. Not many customers used this feature and it made sense on why it was removed.

However, one implication is that if you use HashiCorp Packer and the vmware-iso builder to created automated images with ESXi, it will no longer work after upgrading to ESXi 7.0 as Packer relies on this VNC interface to send automated keystrokes to a VM as part of its automation. After learning about this change with vSphere 7.0, I filed a Packer Github Enhanacement to see if someone would be open to re-implementing the keystrokes functionality by leveraging the vSphere HTML5 Console SDK which would then allow for the use of VNC over websockets. The PR was closed about a month ago and while recently working on the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project, I finally got a chance to verify the feature after upgrading my physical ESXi host to latest 7.0 Update 1 and happy to share that the vmware-iso builder now functions as before.

The following two lines should be added to your Packer template:

"vnc_over_websocket": true
"insecure_connection": true

For reference, you can also refer to the VEBA Packer template

An alternative workaround is to use the vsphere-iso builder which leverages the vSphere USB scan codes API to send keystrokes into a VM without having to rely on the VNC interface. One downside is that you do need have a vCenter Server as the vsphere-iso builder interacts with the vSphere API on vCenter Server rather than directly going to ESXi and this would also impact anyone using Free ESXi to build their Packer images.

The primary reason that I had not switched over to the vsphere-iso builder was that I had quite a few Packer templates using the vmware-iso builder and the syntax was not portable between the two. For this reason alone, I decided to hold off upgrading my physical ESXi host to 7.0 until now.

Quick Tip - Encoding emojis in a Microsoft Teams message using O365 API

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One easy way to integrate with Microsoft Teams is to use an incoming webhook which can be configured on a per-channel basis. While working on creating some new PowerShell functions for the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), I was stuck trying to figure out how to properly encode an emoji icon into the MessageCard type for sending a message to a teams channel.

After a bit of searching and some trial/error, I finally found that you needed to use the emoji hex code with the following format:

&#x<EMOJI-HEX-CODE>;

I used this site here to find the emoji to hex code translation. In addition, I also found that the emojis will only render when used in either the activityTitle or text property of the MessageCard. I was initially trying use this within the facts property which does not work.

Here is a working PowerShell example on constructing the the MessageCard JSON which utilizes emojis:

$teamsMessage = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{
    "@type"      = "MessageCard"
    "@context"   = "http://schema.org/extensions"
    "themeColor" = '0078D7'
    "summary"      = "VMC SDDC Deleted"
    "sections"   = @(
        @{
            "activityTitle" = "&#x1F6A8; **VMC SDDC Deleted** &#x1F6A8;";
            "activitySubtitle" = "In VMC-Customer[0] Organization";
            "activityImage" = "https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2019/07/Icon-2019-VMWonAWS-Primary-354-x-256.png"
            "facts" = @(
                @{
                    "name" = "SDDC:";
                    "value" = "M11-SDDC";
                },
                @{
                    "name" = "Date:";
                    "value" = "2020-07-12T11:20:03.364000Z";
                },
                @{
                    "name" = "User:";
                    "value" = "*protected email*";
                }
            );
            "markdown" = $true;
            "text" = "&#x1F629; This is the text field &#x1F629;";
        }
    )
}

$body = $teamsMessage | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 5
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $teamsWebhookURL  -Method POST -ContentType "application/json" -Body $body | Out-Null

Here is what the rendered Microsoft Teams message will looks like posting to the webhook: