Introduction If you want to learn about the basics and key concepts of ClusterAPI, then check out my post on the Alpha back in June here – it covers the high level concepts and troubleshooting of ClusterAPI, as well as what it offers to you as a user who wants to set up Kubernetes. This […]
Using Velero for K8s Backup and Restore of CSI Volumes
Introduction We’ve covered off prepping and installing K8s on this blog a few different ways; with VM templates built manually, with cloud-init, and with ClusterAPI vSphere. Let’s say you’ve grown attached to some of the workloads you’re running on one of your clusters, naturally. It would be nice to backup and restore those should something […]
First-look: Automated K8s lifecycle with ClusterAPI
Introduction K8s lifecycle is something people are still struggling with, despite amazing tools out there like kubeadm which take care of the K8s setup itself, we are still lacking something fundamental – they day-0 setup. Who/what actually creates the VMs and installs the packages on them so we can get to the stage that we […]
Using cloud-init for VM templating on vSphere
This isn’t necessarily a follow-on from the other three blogs so far in this series, but more of an alternative to parts one and two. Following on from those I felt that the process could be much more automated, and less “ssh into every box and change things manually”. After all, the less changes we […]
Using the vSphere Cloud Provider for K8s to dynamically deploy volumes
Using the VCP As of the last part in the series we have a fully up and running k8s cluster with the vSphere Cloud Provider installed! Let’s make sure it works and is provisioning storage for us by deploying a StorageClass and a test app. Prerequisites Tools I am using macOS, so will be using […]
Setting up K8s and the vSphere Cloud Provider using kubeadm
Intro In the last installment we created an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image to use to clone VMs from for spinning up our K8s nodes, we then cloned four VMs out, one as the master and three to be used as workers. This time we are going to step through installing all the necessary K8s components […]
Creating an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS cloud image for cloning on VMware
Intro I have been experimenting a lot over the past 18 months with containers and in particular, Kubernetes, and one of the core things I always seemed to get hung up on was part-zero – creating the VMs to actually run K8s. I wanted a CLI only way to build a VM template for the […]
Replicating SAN on openSUSE with VAAI
This article was written a few years back, but never published – it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as […]
vSphere Update Manager – Cannot Scan Host
I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer in my lab recently – it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t […]
Deploying Dell OpenManage on ESXi and vCenter 6
If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like […]