Introduction You may have already heard and read about our latest changes regarding our Kubernetes offering(s) vSphere with Tanzu also former known as vSphere with Kubernetes. Personally, I was totally excited and full of anticipation to make my first hands-on experience with this new deployment option –> vSphere Networking as an alternative to NSX-T and how HAProxy is doing it’s job within this construct. I don’t know how you are dealing with installations of the “NEW” but I always read the documentation first… … not … 🙊 … but I should!

Introduction In my previous blog post I took A closer look at VMware’s Project Nautilus and went through some of the implementation details (Fusion 12). I described how it provides a single development platform on the desktop by enabling you to run, build and manage OCI compliant Containers as well as how easy it is now to instantiate Kubernetes Clusters besides Virtual Machines. The question This post is intented to answer a question which came into my mind during my work on VMware’s Open Source project VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) and as I’ve heard of Project Nautilus for the first time.

VMware’s Desktop Hypervisor solutions Fusion for Mac users and Workstation for the Windows and Linux userbase were launched in it’s newest versions on September 15th. Lots of new features, enhancements and support around VM Guest Operating Systems, VM Scaling, GPU, Containers and Kubernetes has made it into these releases. The made enhancements will enrich Developers tool kit as well as will provide great new capabilities for IT Admins and everyone else who is keen on spinning up and down Virtual Machines, Containers and NOW also Kubernetes.

I recently had to prepare my homelab for a customer workshop to demo our new Tanzu Runtime & Hybrid Infrastructure Services. This includes e.g. the deployment of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster on vSphere (TKG Service), the enterprise cloud native registry Harbor as well as the instantiation of a native Pod on vSphere (vSphere Pod Service). Figure I: Tanzu Runtime & Hybrid Infrastructure Services My demo was basically all about the deployment of an application running natively (Native Pod) on vSphere, whose container image I pushed beforehand into my Harbor registry and which in turn was then obtained from there during the application deployment.

Community I recently had the pleasure to suppport a member out of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Slack Community with his function example contribution to the VEBA project. His name is Bob. He introduced his Powershell/ PowerCLI function on a remote session to me and I was immediately thrilled about what the function does. It covers a use case that one of my customers brought up some time ago when I first introduced VEBA to them.

Since the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) is reaching more and more folks out there and the interest is growing steadily, it is important to validate the integration with other solutions (preferably VMware). At least that’s what I thought 😉. Monitoring in terms of utilization and performance captured my interest. So, how can I monitor not only the appliance (virtual machine) but also the Kubernetes components like the Control Plane (Master), the Node(s) as well as the Pods?

…and thus also the Enterprise PKS Management Console (EPMC), which is now inferring named as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition Management Console (TKGIMC). Quote "…VMware is announcing important milestones for key products in the VMware Tanzu portfolio, which brings consistency to building, running, and managing code. VMware is the only company that addresses the challenges of application modernization from both the application and the infrastructure perspective." Source: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/consistency-matters-tanzu-application-service-kubernetes Referring to this 👆, this rebranding was necessary to unify VMware’s Kubernetes offerings under the Tanzu umbrella.

The vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) is still one of my favorite open source projects these days and it is evolving rapidly and continuously through the great work of the two main contributors Michael Gasch and William Lam as well as through the valuable feedback from the community. I´m very proud to be part of the “inner circle” of folks who meet on a regular basis to discuss everything #VEBA and the keyword here is also feedback.

The Universal Workbench I often thought about writing down my experiences on the topics of Jumphosts, Shell-modifications and useful tools in a series of blog posts, but I hadn´t found the right moment, until I saw the following Tweet, where Alex asked his followers how they get access to a Linux system if they aren´t running Linux on their workstation (locally). Ubuntu 18.04 VDI desktop — Mark Brookfield (@virtualhobbit) December 28, 2019 Similar to Mark´s answer, I´m also using a VDI (Virtual-Desktop-Infrastructure) desktop for my purposes and I began writing this series…back in January…time passed by and due to other projects I worked on and which demanded a lot of my attention (VEBA 😁), it took a little bit longer to publish them.

Applications In this section I´m going to list a couple of applications which I´m using for my desktop and how you can easily install them from your shell. Of course, it´s not a must and it´s up to you which of them you´d like to install. Google Chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/ Firefox is pre-installed on Ubuntu as well as on CentOS but I´m for years now with Chrome and I´m still satisfied.