Following on from me recent post deploying Kubernetes with the NSX-T CNP , I wanted to extend my environment to make use of the vSphere Cloud Provider to enable Persistent Volumes backed by vSphere storage. This allows me to use Storage Policy to create Persistent Volumes based on policy. For example, I’m going to create two classes of storage, Fast and Slow - Fast will be vSAN based and Slow will be NFS based.

I’ve done a fair amount of work learning VMware PKS and NSX-T, but I wanted to drop down a level and get more familiar with the inner workings for Kubernetes, as well as explore some of the newer features that are exposed by the NSX Container Plugin that are not yet in the PKS integrations.

The NSX-T docs are…not great, I certainly don’t think you can work out the steps required from the official NCP installation guide without a healthy dollop of background knowledge and familiarity with Kubernetes and CNI. Anthony Burke published this guide which is great, and I am lucky enough to be able to pick his brains on our corporate slack.

I ran into this UI bug the other day when I was trying to enable route redistribution on an Edge in a Secondary site of a cross-vCenter NSX deployment.

The Edge itself was deployed correctly, and configured to peer with a physical northbound router, however when I attempted to configure the route redistribution I was unable to do so.

Fortunately, the solution was simple - use the API.

When I started my blog back in May 2007 (12 years ago!) I was running Wordpress, then switched to DotNetNuke, then BlogEngine, then finally back to Wordpress - which I’ve used since 2010. Today I’ve cut over to a new architecture based on Hugo and hosted on AWS using a combination of Route53, Cloudfront and S3.

Why the change? If it ain’t broke…

You may well ask why I’ve made the move, or you may not…I’m going to tell you anyway…

I recently upgraded an instance of vRA from 7.2 to 7.5 and rather than do it the manual way I used VMware’s vRealize LifeCycle Manager (version 2.0 update 3).

Everything was going great and according to plan, the vRLCM pre-requisites checker made short work of all of the checks you need to do before you start an upgrade of vRA. You can see below vRLCM does a great job of keeping you informed of the current progress and in a really elegant way.

Most vSphere admins are more than comfortable with using Update Manager to download patches and update their environment, but few that I talk to actually know a huge amount about the Update Mangaer Download Service (UMDS). UMDS is tool you can install to download patches (and third party VIBs - I’ll get to that) for Update Manager and it’s useful for environments that don’t have access to the internet, or air-gapped, and also for environments with multiple vCenter Servers where you don’t necessarily want to download the same patch on every server. You can control which patches you download (for example, limiting to ESXi 6.7+ only) and you can add third party Vendor repositories (e.g. Dell or HPE).

It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me.

I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career. Talking to and observing peers whom I respected gave me a lot of inspiration to re-evaluate what I was doing in my career, why I did what I was doing and perhaps most importantly of all was I really being the best I can be?

For the last month I had been preparing for the VCAP7-CMA Design exam and I am very glad to say I passed on my first attempt.

Oddly I found it slightly easier than the VCP7-CMA but that I suspect is down to the fact I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing solutions for customers as opposed to day to day administration of any given solution.

So what was the exam like?

This series was originally going to be a more polished endeavour, but unfortunately time got in the way. A prod from James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) has convinced me to publish as is, as a series of lab notes. Maybe one day I’ll loop back and finish them…

Requirements

Routing

Because I’m backing my vCloud Director installation with NSX-T, I will be using my existing Tier-0 router, which interfaces with my physical router via BGP. The Tier-0 router will be connected to the Tier-1 router, the NSX-T logical switches will be connected to the Tier-1, and the IP networks advertised to the Tier-0 (using NSX-T’s internal routing mechanism) and up via eBGP to the physical router.

It has been a while since I have had time to write a blog post, the last quarter of last year was pretty crazy from a work point of view.

Regardless, it is now a New Year and my tech focus is turning very much on CMP related things particularly vRealize Automation. (I am also very much looking forward to learning more about VMware’s CaS which I saw demo’d at the UK VMUG late last year by Grant Orchard )