Guides - vxCoronado

Upgrading to VxRail 7.0.200

This wednesday 5/5/2021 was RTW (Released to Web) the latested VxRail software 7.0.200 that came with new enhancements like:

vSphere 7.0 Update 2a
New in vSphere 7.0 U2
- HCI Mesh v2
  - Simplified Capacity Monitoring, Planning, and Alerting
  - vSAN performance ‘top contributors’
- vSAN RDMA
- Support internal KMS for vSAN encryption
- File services enhancement
- Suspend VMs to memory during Quick Boot
- Increased scale and DRS awareness for vSAN stretched clusters
Day 2 support of Enhanced Link Mode for VxRail-provided vCenter Server

VMware Tanzu MySQL Operator on vSphere with Tanzu

This weeking I decided to play a little with the VMware Tanzu MySQL that is still on beta deploying it to my vSphere with Tanzu Basic infrastructure. I used as guide the official documentation so if you want more details you can go there. In this blog I’m documenting the specifics or my testing so if you want to follow you will require the following prerequisites:

Prerequisites:

Access to Tanzu MySQL for Kubernetes in VMware Tanzu Network Registry.
Helm installed in your machine.
Kubectl
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service in my case, vSphere with Tanzu Basic (without NSX-T)

Tanzu Build Service (beta) – Guide

Tanzu Build Service uses Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) to turn source code into OCI (Open Container Initiative) compatible container images, no manual compilation or Dockerfiles. This is something developers using CloudFoundry/PAS/TAS loved, and this bring this same experience to application running on Kubernetes.

Deploying Tanzu Application Service for Kubernetes on Kind

Tanzu Application Service for Kubernetes brings the development experience of Tanzu Application Service (formerly called Pivotal Application Service, and before that Pivotal CloudFoundry) to the Kubernetes container orchestrator. It includes the most important features of Tanzu Application Service, such as cf push for buildpack-based apps, while running both the system components and the application instances as Kubernetes workloads.

TAS for Kubernetes is something I have been trying to test for a while. It moved from alpha version to beta on the 14th of April, so it has been open for testing for more than a month now.

CI/CD Pipeline with Jenkins running on Kubernetes and Deploying to Kubernetes.

This week I had a call with a customer to discuss about how we can help them with their DevOps initiatives. I introduced to them the concepts of microservices, containers and Kubernetes, but at the end they where still struggling to understand how all the different technologies fit together.

I proposed to do a workshop and show them the whole process of placing an app in a container and running it in Kubernetes. But hey, that’s not they way the should be doing it a the end right? The whole idea of DevOps is to have an automated pipeline: to go from code, to container, to production automatically, using the concept of CI/CD – Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment.

Deploy VCSA 6.7 nested in VMware Workstation

This is the first post of the series of guides on how to setup a vSphere nested lab in your computer.

One of the key parts, of the nested environment is the vCenter. I could install it on top of a nested ESXi host using the normal procedures, but this brings me to a chicken and egg situation, because what is a benefit for a datacenter running 24×7, having all the availability options applied to my vCenter, is not a good idea for my laptop based nested lab, because I will be turning off all the environment very often. That’s why for this kind of labs, having the vCenter (VCSA) running directly on top of my VMware Workstation is a good idea, but then you need do do some tricks to have it running correctly; you cannot use the regular installer.