virtuallyGhetto

Kubernetes

Sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere & VMware Cloud on AWS

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Last week, VMware had its huge launch which included VMware Cloud Foundation 4, vSphere 7, vSAN 7 and the brand new VMware Tanzu Portfolio that will help organizations build, run and manage modern applications for their business. Although we still have a couple of more months before general availability, the level of excitement for these upcoming releases was pretty amazing to see on social media, especially for the highly anticipated Kubernetes with vSphere capability, formally known as Project Pacific.

When vSphere 7 is available, Kubernetes with vSphere is just one way in which customers will be able to deploy upstream and conformant Open Source Kubernetes also referred to as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). For customers that require a solution today or for those that may not able to upgrade to vSphere 7 immediately, VMware has another option called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus for vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS which was also announced last week but albeit not many folks took notice.


There are few things worth mentioning about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus:

  1. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus is a new offering that is comprised of the core TKG software and it includes support from VMware's Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), which is a team made up of Kubernetes Architects that can help customers design and architect their Cloud Native Applications running on the VMware Tanzu Platform
  2. For customers that do not require CRE support and just want standard VMware GSS Support, then you can simply use Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which includes VMware Support and Subscription (SnS)
  3. The core TKG software which Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus includes can deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (upstream K8s running in VMs). Customers can already do this right now by using Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically the Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) which provides lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster running on any valid vSphere endpoint including VMware Cloud on AWS. The latest CAPV v1alpha3 release also introduces a new workflow that reduces the number of steps compared to v1alpha2 which is now deprecated

For customers that want to further customize how Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster are deployed and configured including tools that they are already using, CAPV will be the most flexible option. Having gone through the CAPV workflows myself, I think it can still be daunting if you are new to this space, not to mention the different CLI tools that you will have to learn to have a successful deployment. Luckily, the VMware TKG team has also been thinking about the overall user experience and how they can build on top of CAPV to provide a much more simpler and more intuitive interface for customers that is just looking for a turnkey option.

Here is a sneak peek (Technical Preview) of the upcoming Tanzu Kubernetes Grid CLI or TKG CLI for short which will make deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on ANY vSphere endpoint incredibly EASY!

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How to fix “extensions/v1beta1” & missing required field “selector” for Yelb Kubernetes application? 

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As you can see from my recent tweets, I have been spending some time with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically Cluster API Provider vSphere (CAPV) and deploying upstream Kubernetes (K8s) running on VMware Cloud on AWS 🙂

After successfully deploying my first K8S Workload Cluster, I knew the first k8s application that I had to deploy on my shiny new K8s Cluster was Massimo Re Ferre' and Andrea Siviero famous "Yelb" application which I had demonstrated several years ago running on VMware PKS. In fact, I had even deployed it recently (late last year) in one of my Project Pacific cluster without any issue, so I was surprised when I ran into some challenges as you can see from the title of the blog post.

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Project Pacific – Workload Evolution in vSphere 

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Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.


If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

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Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

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Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

  • Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
  • NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
  • AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
  • govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.

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sk8s – Simple Kubernetes (k8s) Virtual Appliance

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I recently had a need for a for a basic Kubernetes (k8s) Cluster which I also needed to have running locally in my vSphere Home Lab for testing purposes. I know there are a number of great blog articles out there that shows you how to setup your own k8s from scratch, including a recent blog series from Myles Gray. However, I was looking for something quick that I could consume without requiring any setup. To be honest, installing your own k8s from scratch is so 2017 😉

If you ask most people, they simply just want to consume k8s as an integrated solution that just works and not have to worry about installing and managing the underlying components that make up k8s. VMware PKS and PKS Cloud are two great examples of this where Pivotal and VMware provides a comprehensive solution (including Software Defined Networking) for managing the complete lifecycle (Day 0 to Day N) for running Enterprise K8s, whether that is within your own datacenter or running as a public cloud service. For my exploratory use case, PKS was overkill and I also did not have the required infrastructure setup in this particular environment, so I had to rule that out for now.

While searching online, I accidentally stumbled onto a recent VMware Open Source project called sk8s, short for Simple Kubernetes (k8s) which looked really interesting. At first glance, a few things stood out to me immediately. This project was created by none other than Andrew Kutz, for those not familiar with Andrew's work, he famously created the Storage vMotion UI plugin for the vSphere C# Client before VMware had native UI for the feature. He was also the creator of the first vCenter Simulator back in the day called simDK that was also widely used by a number of customers including myself. I knew Andrew had joined our Cloud Native Business Unit (CNABU), but I was not sure what he was up to these days, guess I now know 🙂 and is helping both VMware and the OSS community in k8s development.

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vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS: