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vSphere 7 with Tanzu Updates

Updating vSphere 7 with #Tanzu Clusters #Kubernetes

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…

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Home Audio/Visual Setup

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…

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2021 Home Lab

The 2021 @theithollow Home Lab

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…

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Customize vSphere 7 with Tanzu Guest Clusters

Customize vSphere 7 with #Tanzu Guest Clusters #vExpert

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…

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Enable the Harbor Registry on vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Enable the Harbor Registry on vSphere 7 with Tanzu #Tanzu #k8s #harbor

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…

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Deploy vSphere TKG Clusters Through Mission Control

Deploy vSphere TKG Clusters Through Mission Control #Tanzu #TKG

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…

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Resizing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Nodes

Resizing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Nodes #Tanzu #TKG

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…

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Non-Interactive Logins to vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

Non-Interactive Logins to vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

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…

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Using YTT to Customize TKG Deployments

Using YTT to Customize TKG Deployments #Tanzu #Carvel #k14s #vExpert

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 yttto mange your TKG YAML…

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Ingress Routing - TKG Clusters

Ingress Routing - TKG Clusters on vSphere7 with #Tanzu

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.

Connect To TKG…

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Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters on vSphere 7

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…

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Create a Content Library for vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Create a Content Library for vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

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…

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Replace vSphere 7 with Tanzu Certificates

Replace vSphere 7 with Tanzu Certificates #tanzu #kubernetes

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…

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Connecting to a Supervisor Namespace

Connecting to a vSphere 7 with Kubernetes Supervisor Namespace

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…

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Creating Supervisor Namespaces

Creating vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, Supervisor Namespaces #v7wk8s #vexpert

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…

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vSphere 7 with Kubernetes - Getting Started Guide

vSphere 7 with Kubernetes - Getting Started Guide #v7wk8s #k8s #kubernetes #vexpert

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…

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Kubernetes Validating Admission Controllers

Kubernetes Validating Admission Controllers

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…