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VMware Cloud on AWS 1.13 adds support for VMRC vCenter Proxy

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VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) 1.13 was just released and although it is an optional release, it does introduce a pretty interesting capability that I think our customers will really appreciate and benefit from, especially when this capability also makes its way into an on-premises vSphere release.

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) vCenter Proxy​

  • VMware Remote Console connections will now be proxied through the SDDC’s vCenter, and clients no longer require connectivity to ESXi hosts.  This simplifies connectivity requirements, and allows for the use of VMRC over VPN when a DX or vTGW is also being used with the SDDC.

Historically, when you wanted to interact with a Virtual Machine using the vSphere UI in vCenter Server, you had two options. You can either use the HTML5 Remote Console within your browser or you could use the standalone VMware Remote Console (VMRC) application. For basic functionality, the HTML5 console is generally preferred but for cases where you might need to mount a local device from your computer such as a USB, bluetooth or CD-ROM device, you had to use the VMRC client.

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New SDDC Linking capability for VMware Cloud on AWS

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Back in September, the VMware Transit Connect (vTGW) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) feature was released and provides users a simplified way of connecting AWS VPCs, AWS Direct Connect Gateways and customer on-premises datacenter from a networking connectivity standpoint. As part of this feature, a new logical construct called an SDDC Group was created which allows customers to easily apply common networking connectivity policies across a number of SDDCs versus having to manage them separately which can quickly get complex from an operational point of view.

The SDDC Group not only simplified the initial setup, but it also simplifies Day 2 Operations when new SDDCs are provisioned and added to the SDDC group. The networking policies that have been configured at the SDDC Group will automatically apply to all new SDDCs which makes this a really slick solution. As SDDCs are removed from the SDDC Group, the related configurations are automatically un-provisioning and detached from the respective networking resources.


Simplified network connectivity using an SDDC Group was just the beginning! Today, the VMware Cloud team has released a new feature built on top of the SDDC Groups construct called vCenter Linking for SDDC Groups. Just as the name implies, customers can now easily "Link" multiple vCenter Servers within an SDDC Group enabling a single view of all vCenter Servers using any one of the vSphere UIs within the SDDC. For those familiar with Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM), this is basically that but for SDDCs running in the Cloud!

The workflow could not have been simpler and last week I got try it out and was quite impressed! Under the hood, this leverages the vCenter Convergence capability and when enabling vCenter Linking, the service automatically handles all those details including the necessary NSX-T firewall rules that need to be configured across ALL SDDC to allow for secured connectivity. Just imagined having to do this each time a new SDDC is added or remove, you need to manually go to all SDDC and update or create new firewall rules!? This is all hidden away from the user and by simply associating SDDCs in the SDDC Group, the configurations are applied automatically for you.

One question that I did have while trying out this new feature was how does this work with existing features such as Hybrid Linked Mode (HLM) and ELM?

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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.0

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Happy to share that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling has been updated to support the latest TKG 1.2.0 release which just came out a couple of weeks ago. The TKG Workshop Guide has been updated to reflect all new TKG 1.2 changes along with an updated vSphere Content Library containing all the OVA required to get started. As mentioned in the workshop guide, you can use either a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (1-Node) or a vSphere 6.7 Update 3/vSphere 7.0+ environment.

The most notable change with this version is actually within TKG itself which now uses kube-vip to replace the functionality that the HAProxy VM used to provide. What this means when deploying either a TKG Management or Workload Cluster is that you will need to specify an IP Address which will be used for the Virtual IP endpoint of the K8s Cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.10


Using the TKG Demo Appliance, you can deploy both v1.19.1 and v1.18.8 K8s Clusters. To exercise a TKG Cluster upgrade workflow, you just have to run these three simple commands:

export VSPHERE_TEMPLATE=photon-3-kube-v1.18.8_vmware.1
tkg create cluster tkg-cluster-01 --plan=dev --kubernetes-version=v1.18.8+vmware.1 --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.11
tkg upgrade cluster tkg-cluster-01


There has been a lot of demand for TKG on VMware Cloud on AWS, so that is where I have spent the bulk of my testing not to mention where it was originally developed. You can also deploy the TKG Demo Appliance in an on-premises vSphere environment running 6.7 Update 3 or newer.

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