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Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

06.12.2018 by William Lam // 3 Comments

While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS:

  • Pivotal Ops Manager for vSphere - 2.1-build.318
  • VMware Harbor Container Registry 1.4.2
  • Pivotal Container Service 1.0.4
  • Stemcell 3668.42 

Categories // Automation, Cloud Native, Home Lab, Kubernetes, NSX, PowerCLI Tags // BOSH, Kubernetes, NSX-T, Pivotal, PKS, PowerCLI

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring

05.03.2018 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

In this blog post, we will take a look at using VMware Wavefront, a recent acquisition, that is a leading SaaS based metrics and monitoring solutions for Cloud Native Applications. Wavefront supports monitoring Kuberenetes (K8S) and many other applications, but what is really neat about Wavefront is that it not only does it give us deeper metrics about our K8S infrastructure (cluster, pod, namespaces and containers), but it can also be used to help developers instrument their application for metric collection and monitoring and provide a complete end-to-end view. The Wavefront team also recently published this blog post which has a nice video demo of their integration with VMware PKS.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 1: Overview
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 2: PKS Client
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 3: NSX-T
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 5: PKS Control Plane
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 6: Kubernetes Go!
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 7: Harbor
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring
  • vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment

[Read more...]

Categories // Cloud Native, Kubernetes Tags // BOSH, Kubernetes, PCF, Pivotal, PKS, Wavefront

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring

05.01.2018 by William Lam // 1 Comment

In this blog post, we go through and configure VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) which Cloud Admins/Platforms Operators can take advantage of to help with monitoring and alerting on the underlying PKS infrastructure (compute, storage & networking). In addition, through the use of vROps Management Packs, users can also get additional visibility into the individually deployed PKS managed Kubernetes (K8S) Clusters which can be useful when debugging and with your development teams.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 1: Overview
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 2: PKS Client
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 3: NSX-T
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 5: PKS Control Plane
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 6: Kubernetes Go!
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 7: Harbor
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring
  • vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment

[Read more...]

Categories // Cloud Native, Kubernetes, vRealize Suite Tags // BOSH, Kubernetes, PCF, Pivotal, PKS, vRealize Operations Manager

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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