Myles Gray

ClusterAPI for vSphere, now with CNS support

Introduction

If you want to 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 blog is a look at what has changed and how you can use ClusterAPI to deploy K8s clusters on vSphere that use CNS and…

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 go wrong – or even, as was my case, I deployed a distro…

First-look: Automated K8s lifecycle with ClusterAPI

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, ClusterAPI aims to solve this.

Who/what actually creates the VMs and installs the packages on them so we can get to the…

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

This…

#Kubernetes on #vSphere Part 3: Using the vSphere Cloud Provider for #K8s to dynamically deploy volumes via: @mylesagray #vExpert #k8sonvmw

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 brewpackage manager to install and manage my tools, if you are using Linux or Windows, use the…

#Kubernetes on #vSphere Part 2: Setting up #K8s and the vSphere Cloud Provider using #kubeadm via: @mylesagray #vExpert

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…

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 OS and then deploy that to the cluster.

It turns out that with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in particular the cloud image OVA)…

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.

https://twitter.com/CormacJHogan/status/936169713637449728

I am stating this for clarity – since the vCD 9.0 release we have supported native SPBM compatibility for vCloud Director. SPBM policies…

Migrating vSAN vmkernel ports to a new subnet

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…

vCloud Director console proxy and UI on a single IP

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…

Removing orphaned IPs from NSX using REST API

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 asking 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…

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.

Through the course of…

vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

Over the last 6-9 months, I have been reviewing the vast majority of a new book just released to print by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort – The vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive.

This book is, without a doubt, the most in-depth look at host design I have ever read, we are not talking about standard best practices here, though those are in there too. More, low-level understanding of whybest…

Enabling IPv6 with DHCPv6-PD and PPPoE on a Fortigate

Out of morbid curiosity (and lack of IPv4 public address space available to me), I decided I wanted to enable IPv6 in my lab. However, before taking the plunge there, I would try it out on my residential ADSL line, I use the same brand of firewall there as in my lab so the experience should be largely transferable.

So for a bit of context; I have a Zen Internet ADSL line (I saw the fiber van…

Vote for your top vBlogs and podcasts!

It’s time for the annual Top 100 vBlog voting as hosted every year by Eric Siebert. This year is notable as some of the long-standing champs of the blogging scene have chosen to withdraw (notably Frank Dennemann and Duncan Epping) to allow some new blood to enter the top 10.

For good reason, as Duncan highlights in his posthe felt that people were voting for him from a longevity point of view…

Implementing a multi-tenant networking platform with NSX

So we have covered the typical challenges of a multi-tenant network and designed a solution to one of these, it’s time to get down to the bones of it and do some configuration! Let’s implement it in the lab, I have set up an NSX ESG Cust_1-ESG and an NSX DLR control VM Cust_1-DLR with the below IP configuration:

I have also enabled OSPF as a NSSA (area 51) between the ESG and the DLR control VM…

Designing a networking platform for IaaS multi-tenancy

Based on my last post, you’ll understand some of the challenges that are faced with traditional approaches to datacenter networking so let’s get into the high-level conceptual design here of how we might solve one of these problems. Most service providers have or are at least familiar with using MPLS for customer segregation in a WAN scope as I alluded to in my previous datacenter networkingartic…