This article has been in my backlog for far too long, even though it’s only a short introduction on two scripts I created to support me/you when demoing/presenting on Knative. Basically, I could stop here and just provide you the link to the repository on but…it would be wrong to leave you without any context. Also, maybe it’s just right to publish the article now, as #KubeCon 2022 Europe starts tomorrow (May, 16th) in beautiful Valencia and with it, the first #KnativeCon 🤩

One thing I really appreciate in my current role at VMware, is being involved in great and often challenging customer engagements. Challenging is good! Because it often includes the opportunity to learn something new, based on the challenge you are facing. During my recent engagements with customers, I had to deal a lot with fully air-gapped environments, where even the jumphost we used had no internet connection. In terms of Kubernetes (K8s) based deployments, where all the container image specifications are referencing to public repositories, you consequently have to make the necessary images offline, in a private registry, available before handing them over to K8s.

Why a Kubernetes-Appliance? Learning Kubernetes (K8s) is still in great demand and is by no means decreasing. Starting with the theory is essential but we all know, the fun part starts with pactice. Quickly instantiating a Kubernetes cluster is made easy and I’m pretty sure it won’t take long until KinD crosses your path. But sometimes, a local K8s instance isn’t enough and practicing Kubernetes low-level implementations like e.g. for networking (CNI) or storage (CSI) on real cloud environments is crucial.

Offline Requirements During a recent Tanzu engagement, my customer wanted to make use of the VMware Tanzu Packages to extend the core functionalities of their existing Kubernetes clusters. As a requirement, an offline deployment of the Packages was raised, which in other words means, deployments from their own private container registry. The intention behind it is simple. All of the Tanzu Packages shown in Table I below are provided by VMware.

The Challenge Just providing a Kubernetes cluster to an application team is in most cases half of the battle. It’s often necessary to provide certain capabilities for e.g. logging or for ingress to those clusters, to ultimately support a production workload. Extending Kubernetes environments with open source solutions, to support the aforementioned capabilities, should provide a decent level of simplicity in terms of deployment and lifecycle management. A Catalog of Extensions Tanzu Mission Control, a VMware Cloud Service (SaaS), is VMware’s multi-cloud Kubernetes management platform which provides a centralized management for consistently operating and securing Kubernetes infrastructures and modern applications through a centralized policy management across all deployed and attached Kubernetes clusters.

VMUG UserCon 2021 It was this exiting time of the year again where lots of great VMware User Group events happened around the globe and this year, I had the pleasure to present two topics at the VMUG UserCon DACH (🇩🇪 🇦🇹 🇨🇭). One of the sessions had the title “NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) - Next Gen Load Balancer for Next Gen (& Traditional) Apps”. This was my first session in which I teamed up for a presentation and I was very happy to have it done with no one else than James Lepthien, a luminary in networking.

Failed to get available workloads: bad gateway The last couple of weeks I spent a lot of time using my Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster(s)1 to get my head around as well as my hands dirty on this awesome project Knative2. More to come soon 😉 Interacting with a healthy vSphere Supervisor Cluster3 is necessary for e.g. the provisioning of new Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster or the instantiation of vSphere Native Pods. Unfortunately, my attempt to login into mine after a recent power outage ends quicker than expected with the error message:

Introduction The VMware OVF Tool 1 is a powerful cli utility with which you can import and export Open Virtualization Format (OVF) packages to and from various VMware products. It’s e.g. used for the creation of several awesome VMware Fling projects like the Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2, the VMware Appliance for Folding@Home 3 as well as for the VMware Event Broker Appliance 4. Also non-fling open source projects like e.

Introduction Quote “Everything fails all the time” – Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO ^^But why always at the most inappropriate moments?! Just recently it happened to me, that one day before I needed my homelab for a presentation, the vSAN caching disk failed and had to be replaced. Nooooooooooo 😩👹 pic.twitter.com/GHELTrPeTn — Robert Guske (@vmw_rguske) February 23, 2021 Normally there is no real issue with loosing a caching device in a vSAN cluster but let me put it that way, I’m really using all my given 2-node cluster resources and a potential risk of data-loss was calculated.

Introduction With the recent v0.5 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project, the ability of deploying the core component, the VMware Event Router, via a Helm chart to an existing Kubernetes cluster was introduced. William Lam introduced this and all the other great new features and enhancements in his corresponding blog post. This earned very positive feedback from the community and opens even more doors in terms of flexibility as well as extensibility.