WilliamLam.com

sk8s - Simple Kubernetes (k8s) Virtual Appliance

by // 21 Comments

I recently had a need for a for a basic Kubernetes (k8s) Cluster which I also needed to have running locally in my vSphere Home Lab for testing purposes. I know there are a number of great blog articles out there that shows you how to setup your own k8s from scratch, including a recent blog series from Myles Gray. However, I was looking for something quick that I could consume without requiring any setup. To be honest, installing your own k8s from scratch is so 2017 😉

If you ask most people, they simply just want to consume k8s as an integrated solution that just works and not have to worry about installing and managing the underlying components that make up k8s. VMware PKS and PKS Cloud are two great examples of this where Pivotal and VMware provides a comprehensive solution (including Software Defined Networking) for managing the complete lifecycle (Day 0 to Day N) for running Enterprise K8s, whether that is within your own datacenter or running as a public cloud service. For my exploratory use case, PKS was overkill and I also did not have the required infrastructure setup in this particular environment, so I had to rule that out for now.

While searching online, I accidentally stumbled onto a recent VMware Open Source project called sk8s, short for Simple Kubernetes (k8s) which looked really interesting. At first glance, a few things stood out to me immediately. This project was created by none other than Andrew Kutz, for those not familiar with Andrew's work, he famously created the Storage vMotion UI plugin for the vSphere C# Client before VMware had native UI for the feature. He was also the creator of the first vCenter Simulator back in the day called simDK that was also widely used by a number of customers including myself. I knew Andrew had joined our Cloud Native Business Unit (CNABU), but I was not sure what he was up to these days, guess I now know 🙂 and is helping both VMware and the OSS community in k8s development.

[Read more...]

govcsim - Neat incubation project (vCenter Server & ESXi API based simulator)

by // 12 Comments

I know many of my readers have inquired about VCSIM (vCenter Server Simulator) which was a really useful tool that served a variety of use cases, but unfortunately it had stopped working with the VCSA 6.0 release. VCSIM is another topic that is near and dear to me and it is something I continue to push and advocate for internally at VMware. Earlier this week, I came to learn about a cool new incubation project that Doug MacEachern had been working on for some time now. Doug is an awesome VMware developer working on the vSphere Integrated Containers (vIC) project and he is also well known for his active contributions to both govmomi (vSphere SDK for Go) and govc CLI.

As you can probably guess from the title, the name of the project is called govcsim and it is a vCenter Server and ESXi API based simulator written using govmomi. It creates a vCenter Server model with a datacenter, hosts, cluster, resource pools, networks and a datastore. The naming of the objects is similar to that of the original VCSIM mode that was included with the VCSA. The number of resources can be increased or decreased using the various resource type flags. Resources can also be created and removed using the API. Doug had developed the tool to provide an easy way for their team to test some of the work they are doing with vIC. The tool is still under incubation but continues to received enhancements. In fact, the other day when I had used it for the first time, I had found a couple of issues which Doug resolved immediately.

I got a chance to give govcsim a spin the other day and currently you can connect to it using govmomi, govc, pyvomi (vSphere SDK for Python) or rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby). It currently does not work with PowerCLI (connects but no inventory), I know this is something Doug is currently looking into. You might also be able to connect using other vSphere SDKs but these are the ones that Doug and I have tried so far.

[Read more...]

Slick way of deploying OVF/OVA directly to ESXi & vCenter Server using govc CLI

by // 9 Comments

I have been meaning to write about this neat little feature that was added to the govc CLI late last year that allows you to easily deploy any OVF/OVA without the need of ovftool. You might ask, why not use ovftool? Well, if you just need to perform a very basic OVF/OVA deploy and prefer not to install anything on your desktop, this can be a nice alternative. govc is provided as a simple binary that is platform agnostic and supports Windows, Linux & Mac OS X. govc is built using govmomi which is also known as the vSphere SDK for Go and this also means you can consume this capablitity beyond just the CLI but also programmatically if you wish. Obviously, the CLI is the easiest method which I will demonstrate below.

Just to be clear, there is still a huge amount of value in using ovftool as it contains a large mount of functionality that is not found any where else. It is still the recommended tool for deploying OVF/OVA across all VMware based Hypervisors and is extensively used by other VMware's products for general OVF/OVA deployment.

[Read more...]