VMware

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 can use kubeadm? Typically it’s up to the user, and as such can vary wildly - so how can that experience be improved, and even better - totally automated and declarative....

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 can make iteratively and imperatively ↗, the more it is programmed or declarative, the better....

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 the brew package manager to install and manage my tools, if you are using Linux or Windows, use the appropriate install guide for each tool, according to your OS....

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 on each of the nodes (kubeadm, kubectl and kubelet), the container runtime (Docker) and configuring the vSphere Cloud Provider for Kubernetes using kubeadm to bootstrap the cluster....

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 OS and then deploy that to the cluster. It turns out that with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in particular the cloud image OVA) there are a few things need changed from the base install (namely cloud-init) in order to make them play nice with OS Guest Customisation in vCenter....

I had a question last week from Bozo Popovic ↗ during our EMEA field SE training session on vSAN operations relating to SPBM support for service providers that use vCloud Director in their environments. Next up Mr. @mylesagray giving a #vSAN operations overview to our EMEA field at the @vmwarevsan workshop this morning pic.twitter.com/48seQc8i7d — Cormac Hogan (@CormacJHogan) November 30, 2017 I am stating this for clarity - since the vCD 9....

After deploying a vSAN cluster, the need sometimes arises to make changes to its network configuration, such as migrating the vmkernel network of the cluster to a new subnet. This requirement may appear for example when changing the network in which the vSAN cluster is running, or even, in a more complex scenario such as when a standalone vSAN needs to be converted to a stretched cluster. In these sorts of situations, complications may be encountered if the subnet in use for the vSAN vmkernel ports cannot be routed to the network as a whole, as it is in use elsewhere in the organization, and is currently isolated in an L2 segment....

I was recently rebuilding part of my lab infrastructure, and as part of it, I wanted to migrate my vCD cells from two IPs each to a single IP (as this feature was added in vCD 8.10 ↗) for both the web UI and the console proxy. It simplifies provisioning, potential routing problems, and load-balancer configuration by having a single IP but separate ports for each service. Adding both services to a single IP is not new, Tomas Fjota wrote about it here ↗, however, there was some detail missing from his article to allow it to work behind a load-balancer....

I had a power outage recently that took out my entire lab in a very ungraceful manner - everything, well mostly everything, came back up without a hitch - but NSX was acting a bit weird, so I decided to redeploy the NSX Controllers. I removed all 3 controllers and tried redeploying but ended up with the error “No IPs left in pool NSX-Controllers”. If you’re familiar with NSX, then you know when creating both controllers and VTEPs you’re required to configure IP Pools in NSX Manager to allocate IP addresses from....

Over the last 9 months, a lot has happened in my life; I have a nice titanium plate in my shoulder now courtesy of a major car accident. I changed roles at Novosco ↗ from Infrastructure Engineer to Cloud Technologist - focusing more on R&D and emerging platforms, and I helped out Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ in editing their best-selling vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive book ↗....