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In the previous posts, we setup the Harvester cluster and optionally added a virtual machine network and some cluster configs. In this post we’ll deploy our first Harvester virtual machine on our cluster. Before we do this, I wanted to point out that we’ve gotten to this point really without ever needing Kubernetes. If you’re paying close attention to the screens that have been showing up in the GUI, you might notice things like a namespace or labels or annotations that are clearly Kubernetes references. Even still, there’s really nothing in the steps up to this point where it would’ve required any Kubernetes experience at all. We’ll continue that trend as we build our first virtual machine. ...

In the first post in this series I deployed a Harvester cluster to my home lab servers. Before I get into deploying virtual machines though, I want to make some common configuration updates to my cluster. For instance, I want my virtual machine network traffic to be placed on a different network. Placing the small amount of network traffic that my virtual machines might be using on their own NIC is probably not necessary in my lab. But I wanted to build the lab in a way that somewhat mimics the way virtual machines are deployed in production environments so I can see how it works. When deploying VMware ESXi hosts, I would commonly have several virtual machine networks on their own NIC, each on their own VLAN. In this post we’ll deploy a Harvester virtual machine network. ...

The installation of Harvester starts with deploying your nodes. This process would be similar to deploying ESXi hosts in a VMware deployment. To start the process, download the latest stable harvester release from their github repository. You can then mount this ISO file from your bare metal server. Create the First Harvester Node in a Cluster After booting to the iso choose the version of Harvester to deploy from their GRUB list. In this example we’ll be using v1.2.1. Since this is the first node in my cluster, I will choose to create a new cluster, and then hit enter. ...

Yes, that’s right, this website is now 10 years old, and while there is no cake or ice cream for this celebration, I thought I’d take a second to reflect on what this website, and the 550 blog posts in it, have meant to me personally. This site has in many ways chronicled my technology career, starting when I was a System Administrator, trying to learn Virtualization, up until now. I had no idea what I wanted this site to be, but I knew that I’d gained so much help from other bloggers in my day to day work, that I wanted to help out somebody myself. It seemed like the leave-a-penny / take-a-penny tray at a store. I didn’t want to only be taking penny’s out of that thing, sometimes you’ve got to be the one putting pennies in. That’s how I felt about my blog when I started. ...

Early this year I saw a challenge drop in my inbox for VMware vExperts to deploy a Plex server with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). I hadn’t gotten to try out TCE yet, and had never messed with Plex so this sounded like a fun adventure. The goal was to architect an entire solution as though this Plex server was going to be a production app that a company might run their business off of. Which means, that I needed to not only get the thing working, but start making some steps to operationalize it. You know of course that production systems come with security, observability, auto-scaling, an incident response routine, etc. Well, this is my home lab so we’ll have to assume that this is my minimum viable product, because as you’ll see, I could still put a lot of work in here. ...

I was messing around in my vSphere home lab and wanted to try out the new Tanzu Community Edition that was recently announced. After getting up to speed on some of the documentation, I tried the installation out in my vSphere 7 lab. There were a couple of notes that I think will help some other people get started with their installation. TCE logo Bootstrapping on MacBook The installation on my MacBook kept failing when trying to deploy the management cluster in my vSphere environment. It turned out that the version of docker I was using was leveraging cgroupsv2 which caused an issue with the bootstrap process. You can read more info about the fixes being worked on in this GitHub issue. To workaround this issue, I pre-deployed a kind cluster using the command: ...

A really common task after deploying a Kubernetes cluster is to configure it to use a container registry where the container images are stored. A Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (TKC) is no exception to this rule. vSphere 7 with Tanzu comes with an embedded harbor registry that can be used, but in many cases you all ready have your own container registry and so you’d like to continue using that instead. ...

My day job requires me to do a lot of work with VMware Cloud on AWS. If I plan on doing any real work with the virtual machines, kubernetes clusters, or applications I really need a VPN tunnel to securely access those resources. My problem has been setting up my aging Ubiquiti USG firewall with BGP. This post will show how I setup a route based VPN tunnel with my Ubiquiti USG. Big shoutout to Brian Beach for his work setting up the USG with an AWS Transit Gateway. ...

I was asked for a post detailing my home A/V setup. So this post will outline the equipment in my office that I use for video conferencing and recording videos. Desk One of the best things I did for my office was to switch to a standing desk. I was spending way too much time sitting in a chair and a standing desk helped to alleviate muscle pain. It also kept me in a bit more active mood if that’s a thing. After doing a bit of research I decided to try the Terra 2 desk. My biggest concern with a standing desk was hiding cables in a desk with no front. So I added the cable chase which did help. It does block the front of the desk top though so if you want to mount anything like a monitor/camera/light mount beware that with the cable chase on, you can’t use a clamp. ...

Time for an update on the home lab. 2020 meant spending a lot of time at home and there were plenty of opportunities to tinker around with the home lab. I did purchase some new hardware, and did plenty of reconfiguring so here’s the 2021 version of my home lab in case anyone is interested. Rack The rack is custom made and been in use for a while now. My lab sits in the basement on a concrete floor. So I built a wooden set of shelves on casters so I could roll it around if it was in the way. I place the UPS on the shelf so that I can unplug the power to move the lab. As long as I have a long enough Internet cable, I can wheel my lab around for as long as the UPS holds on. On one side I put a whiteboard so I could draw something out if I was stuck. I don’t use it that often, but I like that it covers the side of the rack. ...