I recently posted how to upgrade VMware Cloud Director’s Container Service Extension from 4.0.1 to 4.0.3. The next step in the journey is to configure the new CAPVCD provider (1.0.1) on any existing Kubernetes clusters deployed by CSE, and then upgrade those clusters from TKG 1.5.4 images to TKG 1.6.1 images. Wait, what am I updating? Kubernetes clusters deployed by CSE include what’s called a Cluster API Provider (CAP) for VMware Cloud Director (VCD) which is where we get CAPVCD.

I’ve got VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension (CSE) 4.0.1 running in my lab to test and demo Kubernetes Clusters as-a-service in Cloud Director. CSE 4.0.3 was released on the 20th of April 2023 and came with significant improvements. Let’s take a look at my current environment: VCD 10.4.1 CSE UI Plugin 4.0.1 CSE Server 4.0.1 vSphere 7.0U3 NSX-T 4.0.1.1 NSX ALB (Avi) 22.1.2-9086 Based on the above, I don’t need to change a single thing for CSE 4.

With the announcement and release of TKG 2.1, it’s about time I publish a post on deploying TKGm 1.6 in my vSphere lab. /sarcasm If you aren’t familiar with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) or, more specifically, TKG Multi-Cloud (TKG-m) then I highly suggest having a read over the official documentation: What is TKG. In a nutshell, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a great solution to deploy and manage Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. TKGs is the variation of TKG that is deeply integrated with vSphere (also known as vSphere with Tanzu), while TKGm can be deployed and managed across one or many clouds, including vSphere.

Bill of Materials VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.10.2 VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad Extension 2.1.2 Photon OS 4.0 (for ALP) Have you deployed the Application Launchpad (ALP) extension into VMware Cloud Director in your Cloud Platform? You’re probably wondering how you can get those pesky logs out from your ALP servers. I found a great post by Vysakh Nair detailing how to use the vRLI Agent to forward logs from Cloud Director appliances.

This one had me stumped for a few minutes. A while ago I was working with a customer that was trying to boot into the EFI shell of a VM. Restarting into the EFI boot menu, they found the EFI shell option was missing: Turns out, you need power off the machine and disable Secure Boot in the VM’s Boot Options: From this To this Booting the machine you’ll find the EFI Shell:

I’ve had some partners ask for a reference that maps VCD, CSE, TKG images and TKr versions in a single table. Behold! The Cloud Director column details the VCD version, CSE details the version of CSE compatible with the VCD builds. TKG Images column lists the versions of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid images that are supported by CSE, and the Tanzu Kubernetes Release (TKr) column details the Kubernetes releases available for the TKG Images version in the list.

I’ve just hit the six month mark in my new role at VMware: Senior Cloud Solutions Architect - Service Providers. This role sees me working closely with a paired Business Development Manager, aligned to our VMware Cloud Provider Partners to design and build cloud platforms that highlight and expand on their unique offerings. It’s my first foray into the pre-sales world, and I’m loving it. I’ve really enjoyed talking to our partners, learning more about their businesses, and helping them map VMware solutions to their business objectives.

Recently I had a customer testing their vCenter Server 7.0U3e file-based restore process using the VCSA Restore Wizard. During Stage 2 (data copy) the wizard hung at 80% and did not progress for hours. No UI errors or hints as to what was happening. I had a look at the restore wizard logs and found the following: 2022-07-12T01:16:19.828Z - debug: [7]pollRpmInstallProgress:getGuestFileErr:ServerFaultCode: The object 'vim.VirtualMachine:103' has already been deleted or has not been completely created 2022-07-12T01:16:30.

My latest lab excapades required deploying some VMs into Azure using vRealize Automation. Before I did that though, I wanted to configure private network access between my Azure VNet and my lab network to support things like Domain Joining, Lab DNS lookups, SaltStack Config management, etc. My lab network is managed by a virtual PFSense appliance so this post will cover PFSense configuration too. The IPSec tunnel only needs to exist while I’m deploying and testing things.

While I was writing this post I had a step where I wanted to show a GIF of the operation. MacOS’ built-in screen capture was able to record a section of the screen for me as a Quicktime movie (.mov). For obvious reasons a GIF would be a lot simpler for a blog post, but there was no straight forward mechanism to do what I needed. A quick Google returned this Medium article describing a couple of utilities that can get the job done.