Posts on The IT Hollow

Brix Pizza - A Demo App

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:28:24 +0000

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality.

“Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget.

The Power of a Blameless Culture

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 05:53:54 +0000

Today marks the beginning of the 2024 Formula 1 season, a notable day for my mental well-being as it begins the end of a long, cold winter. The winter months often challenge me, limiting my time outdoors and casting shadows over my daily routines. The start of the Formula 1 season provides a needed distraction and spark of excitement as I look forward to warmer weather.

My interest in Formula 1 was ignited by the popular Netflix series, " Drive to Survive." Although new to the sport, I quickly became engrossed, but I initially found myself without a team to support. Over time, the Mercedes Formula 1 team stood out, embodying values I’ve always respected.

Harvester and IPMI Integration

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:58:17 +0000

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important.

Deploy Harvester VMs from a Template

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Virtual infrastructure has a lot of advantages, but one of the biggest time savers is being able to provision new virtual machines quickly from a template. As part of this series we’ve covered, how to deploy harvester, how to setup a new virtual network , how to create a new virtual machine, and how to backup and restore VMs. In this post we’ll take a look at how we can create templates and deploy harvester VMs from templates.

Backup and Restore Harvester VMs

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In our previous posts we setup a Harvester cluster in our lab, configured the network, and deployed our first VM. Here we will explore the backup and restore options available to us from the Harvester console. If you’re new to running virtual machines on Kubernetes, you’re probably questioning a few things, like will your current VM backup tool work? The answer is maybe, but only if it is able to backup a container since our VMs are now wrapped inside of a Kubernetes Pod thanks to Kubevirt. There are several options out there (I work for one of those companies myself) but this post only focuses on whats built into the Harvester solution.

The Harvester Home Lab - VMs and Containers

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:44:16 +0000

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail.

Add Kubernetes to Harvester Installation

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:03:00 +0000

During the previous posts in this series, we deployed a Harvester cluster, setup virtual networks to segment traffic, and deployed our first virtual machine. So far this has been a pretty good experience, but most of my day job requires me to do a lot of work on containers so I’d like to have Kubernetes clusters at home. Of course I could deploy a bunch of VMs for a new Kubernetes cluster, but Harvester is built on top of Kubernetes already. So this post will show us how we can connect Rancher to our Harvester cluster so we can use the underlying Kubernetes cluster that Harvester runs on to run our own containers.

Create a Harvester Virtual Machine

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:02:00 +0000

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.

Creating a Harvester Virtual Machine Network

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:01:00 +0000

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.

Harvester Installation

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

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.

theITHollow Turns 10 Years Old

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:19:10 +0000

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.

VMware Tanzu Challenge - Plex Server

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 22:55:26 +0000

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.

Tanzu Community Edition on vSphere Installation Notes

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:09:59 +0000

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:

Configure a Private Registry for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 13:31:53 +0000

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.

Ubiquiti USG VPN Setup for VMware Cloud on AWS

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 16:15:22 +0000

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.

vSphere 7 with Tanzu Updates

Thu, 13 May 2021 14:45:54 +0000

At some point, you’ll be faced with an upgrade request. New Kubernetes features, new security patches, or just to maintain your support. A vSphere 7 with Tanzu deployment has several components that may need to be updated and most of which can be updated independently of one another. In this post we’ll walk through an update to vSphere, then update the Supervisor namespace, and then finally the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster.

Home Audio/Visual Setup

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 14:05:00 +0000

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.

2021 Home Lab

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 15:14:45 +0000

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.

Customize vSphere 7 with Tanzu Guest Clusters

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:29:00 +0000

Kubernetes clusters can come in many shapes and sizes. Over the past 18 months I’ve deployed quite a few Kubernetes clusters for customers but these clusters all have different requirements. What image registry am I connecting to? Do we need to configure proxies? Will we need to install new certificates to the nodes? Do we need to tweak some containerd configurations? During many of my customer engagements the answer to the above questions is, “yes”.

Enable the Harbor Registry on vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 21:50:57 +0000

Your Kubernetes clusters are up and running on vSphere 7 with Tanzu and you can’t wait to get started on your first project. But before you get to that, you might want to enable the Harbor registry so that you can privately store your own container images and use them with your clusters. Luckily, in vSphere 7 with Tanzu, the Harbor project has been integrated into the solution. You just have to turn it on and set it up.

Deploy vSphere TKG Clusters Through Mission Control

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:03:00 +0000

There is new functionality included in VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) that I’m pretty excited about. After the recent update, you can now register your vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster with TMC and then begin provisioning workload clusters.

Before you can provision clusters, you’ll need to register your TKG Supervisor cluster to TMC. Those procedures require you to apply and update some YAML which you can find here.

Deploy a vSphere TKG Cluster through TMC

Login to your TMC account and go to the Clusters tab. Click the CREATE CLUSTER button where you’ll now see a drop down. Select Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service on vSphere 7.

Resizing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Nodes

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 15:05:00 +0000

Have you ever missed when trying to properly size an Kubernetes environment? Maybe the requirements changed, maybe there were wrong assumptions, or maybe the project took off and it just needs more resources. Under normal circumstances, I might suggest to you to build a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster and re-deploy your apps. Unfortunately, as much as I want to treat Kubernetes clusters as ephemeral, they can’t always be treated this way. If you need to resize your TKG nodes without re-deploying a new cluster, then keep reading.

Non-Interactive Logins to vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

You’ve deployed your first Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters in vSphere 7 and are beyond the learning phase. You’re now ready to start automating your Kubernetes cluster builds, and application deployments.

Typically you’d login to your TKG clusters through the kubectl cli with a command like:

kubectl vsphere login ...

Normally, you’d be right, but that command requires an interactive login, meaning for you to wait for a second prompt to enter a password. The current version of the vSphere plugin doesn’t have an option for non-interactive logins so we need to get creative until this feature is added.

Using YTT to Customize TKG Deployments

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 15:05:00 +0000

If you’ve worked with Kubernetes for very long, you’ve surely run into a need to manage YAML files. There are a bunch of options out there with their own benefits and drawbacks. One of these tools is called ytt and comes as part of the Carvel tools (formerly k14s).

If you’re working with the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid product from VMware, you’re likely to be using ytt to mange your TKG YAML manifests. This post aims to help you get started with using ytt for your own customizations.

Ingress Routing - TKG Clusters

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 14:05:00 +0000

If you have been following the series so far, you should have a TKG guest cluster in your lab now. The next step is to show how to deploy a simple application and access it through a web browser. This is a pretty trivial task for most Kubernetes operators, but its a good idea to know whats happening in NSX to make these applications available. We’ll walk through that in this post.

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters on vSphere 7

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 14:15:00 +0000

This post will focus on deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters in your vSphere 7 with Tanzu environment. These TKG clusters are the individual Kubernetes clusters that can be shared with teams for their development purposes.

I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t we already create a Kubernetes cluster when we setup our Supervisor cluster? The short answer is yes. However the Supervisor cluster is a unique Kubernetes cluster that probably shouldn’t be used for normal workloads. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a follow-up post. For now, let’s focus on how to create them, and later we’ll discuss when to use them vs the Supervisor cluster.

Create a Content Library for vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 14:15:00 +0000

In this post we’ll setup a vSphere Content Library so that we can use it with our Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guest clusters. If you’re not familiar with Content libraries, you can think of them as a container registry, only for virtual machines.

Why do we need a content library? Well, the content library be used to store the virtual machine templates that will become Kubernetes nodes when you deploy a TKG guest cluster.

Replace vSphere 7 with Tanzu Certificates

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 14:45:00 +0000

When setting up your vSphere 7 with Tanzu environment, its a good idea to update the default certificate shipped from VMware with your own certificate. This is a good security practice to ensure that your credentials are protected during logins, and nobody likes to see those pesky certificate warnings in their browsers anyway, am I right?

Create and Trust Certificate Authority

This section of the blog post is to create a root certificate. In many situations, you won’t need to do this since your organization probably already has a certificate authority that can be used to sign certificates as needed. Since I’m doing this in a lab, I’m going to create a root certificate and make sure my workstation trusts this cert first. After this, we can use the root certificate to sign our vSphere 7 certificates.

Connecting to a Supervisor Namespace

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 14:15:00 +0000

In this post we’ll finally connect to our Supervisor Cluster Namespace through the Kubernetes cli and run some commands for the first time.

In the last post we created a namespace within the Supervisor Cluster and assigned some resource allocations and permissions for our example development user. Now it’s time to access that namespace so that real work can be done using the platform.

First, login to vCenter again with the administrator@vsphere.local account and navigate to the namespace that was previously created. You should see a similar screen where we configured our permissions. In the Status tile, click one of the links to either open in a browser or copy the URL to then open in a browser.

Creating Supervisor Namespaces

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 14:15:00 +0000

Congratulations, you’ve deployed the Workload Management components for your vSphere 7 cluster. If you’ve been following along with the series so far, you’ll have left off with a workload management cluster created and ready to being configuring your cluster for use with Kubernetes.

The next step in the process is to create a namespace. Before we do that, it’s probably useful to recap what a namespace is used for.

Namespaces the Theory

Depending on your past experiences, a namespace will likely seem familiar to you in some fashion. If you have a kubernetes background, you’ll be familiar with namespaces as a way to set permissions for a group of users (or a project, etc) and for assigning resources. Alternatively, if you have a vSphere background, you’re used to using things like Resource Pools to set resource allocation.

vSphere 7 with Tanzu - Getting Started Guide

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:16:18 +0000

VMware released the new version of vSphere with functionality to build and manage Kubernetes clusters. This series details how to deploy, configure, and use a lab running vSphere 7 with Kubernetes enabled.

The instructions within this post are broken out into sections. vSphere 7 requires pre-requisites at the vSphere level as well as a full NSX-T deployment. Follow these steps in order to build your own vSphere 7 with Kubernetes lab and start using Kubernetes built right into vSphere.

Enable Workload Management

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:44:36 +0000

This post focuses on enabling the workload management components for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. It is assumed that the vSphere environment is already in place and the NSX-T configuration has been deployed.

To enable workload management, login to your vCenter as the administrator@vsphere.local account. Then in the Menu, select Work

Within the Workload Management screen, click the ENABLE button.

The first screen in the wizard, will list your compatible vSphere clusters. These clusters must have HA and DRS enabled in fully automated mode. If you are missing clusters, make sure you have ESXi hosts on version 7 with HA and DRS enabled. You’ll also need a Distributed switch on version 7 for these clusters.

vSphere 7 with Kubernetes Environment and Prerequisites

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:42:33 +0000

This post describes the lab environment we’ll be working with to build our vSphere 7 with Kubernetes lab and additional prerequisites that you’ll need to be aware of before starting. This is not the only topology that would work for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, but it is a robust homelab that would mimic many production deployments except for the HA features. For example, we’ll only install one (singular) NSX Manager for the lab where in a production environment would have three.

Tier-0 Gateway

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:39:41 +0000

This post will review the deployment and configuration of a Tier-0 gateway to provide north/south routing into the NSX-T overlay networks.

The Tier-0 (T0) gateway is where we’ll finally connect our new NSX-T backed overlay segments to the physical network through an NSX-T Edge which was previously deployed.

The Tier-0 gateway will connect directly to a physical VLAN and on the other side to our T1 router deployed in the previous post. From there, we should have all the plumbing we need to route to our hosts and begin using NSX-T to do some cooler stuff. In the end, the network topology will look something like this:

Tier-1 Gateway and NSX Segments

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:36:56 +0000

This post will focus on deploying our first NSX Gateway/Router and setting up our overlay segments. Before you can start these steps, the Edge nodes should be up and running so that they can support the Tier-1 gateways.

NSX uses two types of routers/gateways. We’ll start by using a Tier-1 (T1) router. These routers are usually used to pass traffic between NSX overlay segments. We could create NSX segments without any routers, but it would require a router to pass traffic between these segments so we will create a T1 router first.

Deploy NSX-T Edge Nodes

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:26:22 +0000

NSX-T Edge nodes are used for security and gateway services that can’t be run on the distributed routers in use by NSX-T. These edge nodes do things like North/South routing, load balancing, DHCP, VPN, NAT, etc. If you want to use Tier0 or Tier1 routers, you will need to have at least 1 edge node deployed. These edge nodes provide a place to run services like the Tier0 routes. When you first deploy an edge, its like an empty shell of a VM until these services are needed.

NSX Pools, Zones, and Nodes Setup

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:23:46 +0000

In the previous post we deployed an NSX Manager. Now it’s time to start configuring NSX so that we can build cool routes, firewall zones, segments, and all the other NSX goodies. And even if we don’t want to build some of these things, we’ll need this setup for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes.

Add an IP Pool

The first thing we’ll setup is an IP Pool. As you might guess, an IP Pool is just a group of IP Addresses that we can use for things. Specifically, we’ll use these IP Addresses to assign Tunnel Endpoints (Called TEPs previously called VTEPs in NSX-V parlance) to each of our ESXi hosts that are participating in the NSX Overlay networks. The TEP becomes the point in which encapsulation and decapsulation takes place on each of the ESXi hosts. Think of it this way, when encapsulated traffic needs to be routed to a VM on a host, what IP Address do we need to send the traffic to, so that it can reach that VM. This is the TEP. We need to setup a TEP on each host, and the IP Addresses for these TEPs come from an IP Pool. Since I have three hosts, and expect to deploy 1 edge nodes, I’ll need a TEP Pool with at least 4 IP Addresses. Size your environment appropriately.

NSX Installation

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:18:52 +0000

This post will focus on getting the NSX-T Manager deployed and minimally configured in the lab. NSX-T is a pre-requisite for configuring vSphere 7 with Kubernetes as of the time of this writing.

Deploy the NSX Manager

The first step in our build is to deploy the NSX Manager from an OVA template into our lab. The NSX Manager is the brains of the solution and what you’ll be interacting with as a user. Each time you configure a route, segment, firewall rule, etc., you’ll be communicating with the NSX Manager. Download and deploy the OVA into your vSphere lab.

Kubernetes Validating Admission Controllers

Tue, 26 May 2020 15:05:00 +0000

Hey! Who deployed this container in our shared Kubernetes cluster without putting resource limits on it? Why don’t we have any labels on these containers so we can report for charge back purposes? Who allowed this image to be used in our production cluster?

If any of the questions above sound familiar, its probably time to learn about Validating Admission Controllers.

Validating Admission Controllers - The Theory

Admission Controllers are used as a roadblocks before objects are deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. The examples from the section above are common rules that companies might want to enforce before objects get pushed into a production Kubernetes cluster. These admission controllers can be from custom code that you’ve written yourself, or a third party admission controller. A common open-source project that manages admission control rules is Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Kubernetes Liveness and Readiness Probes

Mon, 18 May 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Just because a container is in a running state, does not mean that the process running within that container is functional. We can use Kubernetes Readiness and Liveness probes to determine whether an application is ready to receive traffic or not.

Liveness and Readiness Probes - The Theory

On each node of a Kubernetes cluster there is a Kubelet running which manages the pods on that particular node. Its responsible for getting images pulled down to the node, reporting the node’s health, and restarting failed containers. But how does the Kubelet know if there is a failed container?

Kubernetes Pod Auto-scaling

Mon, 04 May 2020 14:05:00 +0000

You’ve built your Kubernetes cluster(s). You’ve built your apps in containers. You’ve architected your services so that losing a single instance doesn’t cause an outage. And you’re ready for cloud scale. You deploy your application and are waiting to sit back and “profit.”

When your application spins up and starts taking on load, you are able to change the number of replicas to handle the additional load, but what about the promises of cloud and scaling? Wouldn’t it be better to deploy the application and let the platform scale the application automatically?

Kubernetes Resource Requests and Limits

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Containerizing applications and running them on Kubernetes doesn’t mean we can forget all about resource utilization. Our thought process may have changed because we can much more easily scale-out our application as demand increases, but many times we need to consider how our containers might fight with each other for resources. Resource Requests and Limits can be used to help stop the “noisy neighbor” problem in a Kubernetes Cluster.

Resource Requests and Limits - The Theory

Kubernetes uses the concept of a “Resource Request” and a “Resource Limit” when defining how many resources a container within a pod should receive. Lets look at each of these topics on their own, starting with resource requests.

In-tree vs Out-of-tree Kubernetes Cloud Providers

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:05:00 +0000

VMware offers a Kubernetes Cloud Provider that allows Kubernetes (k8s) administrators to manage parts of the vSphere infrastructure by interacting with the Kubernetes Control Plane. Why is this needed? Well, being able to spin up some new virtual disks and attaching them to your k8s cluster is especially useful when your pods need access to persistent storage for example.

The Cloud providers (AWS, vSphere, Azure, GCE) obviously differ between vendors. Each cloud provider has different functionality that might be exposed in some way to the Kubernetes control plane. For example, Amazon Web Services provides a load balancer that can be configured with k8s on demand if you are using the AWS provider, but vSphere does not (unless you’re using NSX).

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Clusters - vSphere

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:00:00 +0000

VMware recently released the 1.0 release of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which aims at decreasing the difficulty of deploying conformant Kubernetes clusters across infrastructure. This post demonstrates how to use TKG to deploy a management cluster to vSphere.

If you’re not familiar with TKG yet, you might be curious about what a Management Cluster is. The management cluster is used to manage one to many workload clusters. The management cluster is used to spin up VMs on different cloud providers, and lay down the Kubernetes bits on those VMs, thus creating new clusters for applications to be build on top of. TKG is built upon the ClusterAPI project so this post pretty accurately describes the architecture that TKG uses.

Hello World - COVID-19 and Golang

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 17:53:26 +0000

There is a worldwide pandemic going on right now and it has disrupted practically everything. Many people are worried not only about their health and families health, but also their job situations. I feel incredibly fortunate that my employer seems intent on continuing to work through this situation and that I am already a remote worker most of the time.

My team was asked to of course take care of our families, but also to take this opportunity to learn something new. I took this respite from normal activities to try to learn how to do some basic Golang (Go) programming. I have a hard time focusing on a project sometimes when there are no specific goals in mind, so my “Hello World” attempt at programming in Golang was to grab the latest COVID-19 statistics and post them to slack once per day.

Tanzu Mission Control Getting Started Guide

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:04:19 +0000

VMware Tanzu is a family of products and services for modernizing your applications and infrastructure with a common goal: deliver better software to production, continuously. The portfolio simplifies multi-cloud operations, while freeing developers to move faster and access the right resources for building the best applications. VMware Tanzu enables development and operations’ teams to work together in new ways that deliver transformative business results.

One of these new solutions within the Tanzu brand is Mission Control. If you’re looking to get started with Tanzu Mission Control for management and visibility for your Kubernetes Clusters, start with the articles below. You’ll learn the basics of Tanzu Mission Control, how to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters, assigning policies, and managing lifecycles of those clusters.

Tanzu Mission Control - Access Policies