Tech Insights

  • Tanzu Cluster Upgrade and Pod Security Admission

    I was recently tasked with upgrading a Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster to v1.26.5 (version v1.26.5+vmware.2-fips.1 to be specific). Once I completed the upgrade, to my surprise, when I did a “kubectl get pods“, I found them to be missing. When i went digging for any known issues, I noticed something related to Pod Security that I…

  • Retrieve Tanzu Guest Cluster SSH Password – Automation

    With the growing popularity of vSphere 8, more and more customers are starting to adopt vSphere with Tanzu as their de-facto Kubernetes platform since it provides them the flexibility to either: Deploy containers directly onto the hypervisor (vSphere Pods – in a certain deployment topology) or Manage their own Kubernetes cluster (TKCs). Kubernetes aside, vSphere…

  • Scale Tanzu VMs using a simple shell script

    VMware’s Tanzu Portfolio offers enough products that can help you on your modernisation journey. They also have something for traditional vSphere guys like me 🙂 Yes, vSphere with Tanzu offers first hand Kubernetes experience without compromising on the chill and thrill that vSphere has been able to give us for so long 🙂 In today’s…

  • Build an incremental OVA from a VM template using Packer

    Hola, folks! Another day at office and another use-case to be documented… I am sure most of you must have already been already introduced to Packer. I, first hand, experienced what it could do to help operationalising an environment. Just in case, if you haven’t learnt about it yet, as the saying goes: “Its never…

  • vCenter Services monitoring using vCenter API

    Recently, I came across a use-case, where there was a requirement to create an in-house dashboard (visualization) to monitor anything-VMware. As part of this project, it was decided that the vCenter Services’ status needs to be captured as well and so there I was, wondering if the “API Explorer” that is now embedded as part…

  • Replacing Supervisor Cluster Certificates

    In my last post, I discussed about replacing supervisor cluster’s VIP cert and the load balancer cert. This article will be a continuation of sorts. Supervisor cluster is compromised of so many individual components that communicate between each other and with vCenter using certificates and this signifies the importance of this certs being valid at…

  • vSphere with Tanzu API and Ingress Certificate Replacement

    I wrote about enabling vSphere with Tanzu here. Much hasn’t changed about the pre-reqs and the procedure when it comes to the latest version of vSphere 7.0 U3, except for a few cosmetic changes. I haven’t tested it on vSphere 8 yet. If there are changes, I would love to blog about it too 🙂…

  • Velero and vSphere – Part 4

    Since we have completed all the pre-requisites required to back up a vSphere pod using Velero in the previous three blogs, we will look into the procedure of backing up and restoring the pod in this blog. Step 1: I have created a namespace called “vsphere-pods” and deployed a nginx pod into it. Step 2:…

  • Velero and vSphere – Part 3

    So far in this series of blogs, we have installed MinIO on a Ubuntu server, installed the Data Manager and the Velero vSphere Operator on the Supervisor cluster. We will continue in our journey to backup and restore a vSphere pod. The next step would be to install the vSphere plugin for Velero. Step 1:…

  • Velero and vSphere – Part 2

    As a follow up to my previous blog about setting up MinIO for Velero vSphere Operator, I would like to describe the process of installing the Velero vSphere Operator in this blog. You can refer to the official documentation here. Since we have already installed MinIO, we will now deploy the Data Manager using OVA….