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Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

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Last week I demonstrated how to take advantage of the new Kubernetes Cluster API Bring Your Own Host (BYOH) Provider with a VM running on ESXi-Arm and managed with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). The Cluster API BYOH Provider is currently only tested and supported with an Ubuntu OS, but since the only requirements for a linux host was simply: kubeadm, kubelet and containerd, I figured it should also be possible with VMware's Photon OS which also has an Arm edition.

With a TON of trial/error and reverting snapshots, I was able to finally get Cluster API BYOH Provider to successful run on Photon OS as shared in a recent tweet.

What actually made this possible was actually the work I had done with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project which also involves Photon OS and Kubernetes. More specifically, I had recently worked on porting VEBA from using the Docker runtime to Containerd with Kubernetes and that prior experience was invaluable while figuring out how to do this with Photon OS (Arm) which also had its own challenges. The instructions below will help setup a Photon OS (Arm) VM that can then be used with Cluster API BOYH Provider and the previous article will still need to be reference for the complete setup.

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Packer reference for PhotonOS Arm NFS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties for ESXi-Arm

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In case the title was not descriptive enough, I was curious if I could build an Arm Virtual Appliance (OVA) using OVF properties that would allow for all sorts of interesting guest customizations which I have blogged about before here, here, here and here using x86 PhotonOS as a reference implementation. My idea for this actually pre-dated the release of the ESXi on Arm Fling, but it was only until recently with support for VMware Tools for Photon OS Arm, was I able to finally piece together this solution.

It was also neat to see that I could build an Arm OVA using x86 tooling (Packer and OVFTool) which ran on my desktop and you simply needed an ESXi-Arm host. This really goes to show the level of compatibility from a management and vSphere API point of view that an ESXi-Arm host behaves just like a standard x86 ESXi host!

To demonstrate a more interesting use case than just basic network customization for the ?first? Arm OVA, I thought it would be useful to setup a simple NFS appliance that would take input from the user such the size of the exported volume (default 60GB) and then the name of the mount point. Upon first boot up, there is a guest customization script that would read in the OVF properties and configure the networking, OS password and NFS server configuration which you can certainly use to host your Arm VMs.

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How to manually install Folding @ Home on VMware Photon OS?

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As many of you may already know, VMware just released the VMware Appliance for Folding @ Home Fling last week and you can check out this blog post A Force for Good: VMware Appliance for Folding @ Home by Amanda Blevins for all the details. For those new to F@H and wish to participate, the VMware F@H Appliance is highly recommended as it is optimized and makes it very easy to setup and all configurations are driven through OVF properties. We certainly would appreciate it if you supported Team VMware (52737) which is the default team configuration but you can technical specify any valid F@H team ID during the deployment wizard.

Early next week, I expect to release another update to the appliance which will include support for vHW11, VMware Fusion and Workstation and several other enhancements and fixes. Having said that, there are a handful of folks who may not be able to use the appliance as-is or prefer to run this on another Hypervisor platform which does not support OVF properties but still wish to support Team VMware's effort with F@H. For these reasons, here are the instructions for using VMware Photon OS, a free and tiny Linux distribution for running the F@H home software.

Disclaimer: VMware does not officially support the Folding At Home application. For more details or questions, please refer to the official F@H documentation as well as their technical forums.
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