BOSH

vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment

06/12/2018 by William Lam 3 Comments

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:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring

05/03/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

In this blog post, we will take a look at using VMware Wavefront, a recent acquisition, that is a leading SaaS based metrics and monitoring solutions for Cloud Native Applications. Wavefront supports monitoring Kuberenetes (K8S) and many other applications, but what is really neat about Wavefront is that it not only does it give us deeper metrics about our K8S infrastructure (cluster, pod, namespaces and containers), but it can also be used to help developers instrument their application for metric collection and monitoring and provide a complete end-to-end view. The Wavefront team also recently published this blog post which has a nice video demo of their integration with VMware PKS.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring

05/01/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

In this blog post, we go through and configure VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) which Cloud Admins/Platforms Operators can take advantage of to help with monitoring and alerting on the underlying PKS infrastructure (compute, storage & networking). In addition, through the use of vROps Management Packs, users can also get additional visibility into the individually deployed PKS managed Kubernetes (K8S) Clusters which can be useful when debugging and with your development teams.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging

04/26/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

In this blog post, we will walk through configuring the various components within a PKS deployment such as vSphere (vCenter Server & ESXi), NSX-T (Manager, Controllers & Edges), BOSH and PKS Control Plane to forward their logs to an external syslog system such as a VMware vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) which includes 25 free OSI licenses for any vSphere customer.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview

04/24/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

I had received a few questions about the monitoring capabilities for VMware PKS and some of the VMware tools that can help provide visibility and audibility of the platform. Different consumers of PKS will care about different things, as you can imagine the cloud admin/platform operator is primarily concerned with the underlying infrastructure (compute, storage, network) including the PKS Management components. Developers want to know how their application is doing and if there are any issues, how to quickly access the information they need to debug and fix the problem.

Logging

Complete end-to-end logging is a mandatory requirement for many customers, especially when it comes to dealing with large and complex application deployments. Being able to provide centralized access of all logs to both operators and developers is key to be able to quickly triage and resolve an issue. Remote syslog can be configured throughout the PKS stack from the infrastructure and going all the way up to the application if developers decides to instrument logging and sending it to the same syslog target. VMware customers can take advantage of vRealize Log Insight (vSphere customers receive 25 free OSI licenses) which is a on-premises log management solution. If you prefer a SaaS-based solution, VMware also has Log Intelligence which can be used to service both premises infrastructure as well as other cloud hosted deployments.

Infrastructure Monitoring

For Cloud Admins/Platform Operators, vRealize Operations Manager (vROPs) will be the tool of choice which many of our customers are already familiar with. vROps provides analytics, capacity management and alerting for all of your underlying compute, storage and networking infrastructure. This information can be trended over time and provide help proactive identify any anomalies within the infrastructure before they arise. There are a number of Management Packs that can be used to provide easy to consume and out of the box dashboards such as vSphere which gives you information about your vCenter Server and the ESXi hypervisor, NSX-V as well as NSX-T for networking/security and core storage including VSAN.

Application Monitoring

Unlike traditional applications, Cloud Native Apps require a completely different way of monitoring to ensure Developers can easily access the important information they require for development purposes. VMware Wavefront is a SaaS-based solution that is metrics monitoring and analytics platform that can handle the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Not only can Developers instrument their own applications and forward that to Wavefront, but Wavefront also provides complete visibility into a Kubernetes (K8S) deployment from namespaces, nodes, pods and all the way down to the individual containers.

Here is a diagram to help illustrate the visibility that each solution provides:

In the next three posts, I walk through the configuration steps to setup vRLI, vROPs and Wavefront with VMware PKS.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 7: Harbor

04/10/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

Now that we have a functional PKS deployment, an optional but very useful add-on to deploy and integrate with PKS is the VMware Harbor solution. Harbor is an Enterprise-class container registry that customers can run within their own Datacenter to securely store and provide access to container images used by their development teams. The process of deploying Harbor is similiar to PKS. You will need to download the Harbor Tile from Pivotal Network, import that into Ops Manager and then configure and deploy using the same interface.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here: