Terraform providers are widely used to provision infrastructure across diverse cloud environments. While Terraform originated primarily in the public cloud, many organizations now rely on it heavily for on-premises deployments as well. Because VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation exposes a Kubernetes-compatible API for resource provisioning, teams have traditionally been able to use the native Kubernetes… Read More »
I am one of those people who regularly use AI services from well-known providers for questions, troubleshooting, code generation, and other topics. However, I had never really thought about establishing my own AI service in a lab environment until now. Because VMware provides “Private AI Services” (PAIS), my peer Christian Liebner and I decided to… Read More »
The VCF Automation All-Apps-Org provisions and manages resources through the vSphere Supervisor Service. This means all resources will be deployed as Kubernetes resources with a Kubernetes-based yaml file and related parameters. The consumption can be done directly using the Kubernetes interface of VCF Automation or services can be exposed in the catalog. With the catalog,… Read More »
Customers who don’t have internet connectivity in their datacenter will need an offline depot server which hosts the VCF 9.x installation, patch and update sources. For this any standard web server can be used. One option however is to deploy a web server based on the VMware Photon OS appliance. The process to create a… Read More »
VCF Automation 9 is intensively using Content Libraries to store images. Aria Automation 8.18 already included Content Library support which has persisted in the VCF 9 VM-Apps-Org. However, the All-Apps-Org is 100% based on Content Library leverage and has a completely different architecture. Find more details on the Aria Automation 8.18 Content Library architecture in… Read More »
As part of the VCF 9 deployment it is essential to establish a management domain which includes VCF Operations, Fleet Manager and SDDC Manager for lifecycle management of the infrastructure and management layer. Customers can decide if they want to build the management domain from ground-up or if they would like to converge an existing… Read More »
My peer Christian Liebner has already created a blog related to external-dns. While he is focussing on External-DNS as supervisor service and its benefit for VM deployments, this blog here has a deeper look into the the more generic capabilities of External-DNS for VKS Clusters. So, what is external-dns (sometimes also referred to as ExtDNS)?… Read More »
VCF 9 provides fully integrated Kubernetes support. This starts with a supervisor installation that in a nutshell enables Kubernetes on the ESX hosts. Finally, it allows provisioning of vSphere Kubernetes Clusters within a namespace. There’s also the capability to leverage supervisor services which are delivered by VMware directly on the supervisor clusters. Find here the… Read More »
DNS entries are a critical component when provisioning virtual machines. To simplify this process, this blog post demonstrates how to leverage the ExternalDNS Service within the VCF 9 Supervisor to automate the creation of DNS records directly in Microsoft DNS. Where in VM-Apps-Org this usually has been done by an extensibility workflow (e.g. Orchestrator), in… Read More »
With the new All-Apps-Org in VCF Automation 9, the users can provision Kubernetes Clusters (VKS Clusters) leveraging vSphere Kubernetes Services. After provisioning, the Kubernetes Cluster shows up in the Automation UI in the respective Supervisor Namespace. The question however is: How can users access this cluster directly from the CLI using kubectl? In general, a… Read More »
Thanks to Veneling Bakalov for his help! VCF Automation 9 has multiple APIs that can be used (REST, Kubernetes). All have in common that for authentication a refresh token needs to be generated. By default, this is done through the UI where in the account properties there is the option to create a new API… Read More »
Thanks to Maher AlAsfar for reviewing the article! VCF Automation 9 has multiple levels of API access. There is the provider level where e.g. orgs can be created, the org level where projects, policies etc. are managed and the resource level. For all API calls there’s a good documentation page in the product which sometimes… Read More »
Within our new All Apps organization, we leverage Supervisor Services that are accessible through Kubernetes as well as VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.This post walks through deploying VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) as a Supervisor Service and using it to create databases automatically through the Automation portal. Deploy DSM Appliance In vCenter open the Administration Menü… Read More »
Thanks to Meera Menon for her help on this topic! One value proposition of the VCF Platform is that it manages both, VM-based as well as Kubernetes-based workloads. VCF includes the vSphere Supervisor Services, which provide the capability of deploying fully supported Kubernetes Clusters. VCF Automation makes sure that consumers can provision VMs, other resources… Read More »
So, you proudly wired up your VCF 9 environment to an Identity Broker, hit save, and thought: “Nice, job done.” But then you realize… you just pointed your shiny Los Angeles VCF instance at the San Francisco Identity Broker. Oops. Now every time you try to configure Identity Broker in LA, it just kicks you… Read More »
When talking about automation, Terraform is a tool which is often used at customer installations. Many customers leverage it to manage public cloud resources as it originally has been built for that. As VCF is a private cloud solution it sounds logical to add those resources as well for a Terraform configuration. While there might… Read More »
We sometimes get the question how to install a standalone VCF Operations and VCF Operations for Logs without the VCF installer. Some customers want to use the OVAs in their environments and manage them over the lifecycle option in Fleet Management. So only for monitoring purposes with some lifecycle options for the Management Solutions. I… Read More »
We sometimes get the question how to install a standalone VCF Operations and VCF Operations for Logs without the VCF installer. Some customers want to use the OVAs in their environments and configure them without Fleet Management. So only for monitoring purposes without additional overhead for management. I have therefore reproduced the necessary steps and… Read More »
There are two types of organizations in VCF Automation 9. The All Apps Org and the VM Apps Org. The All Apps Org automatically configures the associated Account in Operations 9, but the Account for the VM Apps Org must be set up manually. Since we need a service account for this, I have written… Read More »
So, you’ve installed VCF Automation 9, and you’re all excited to peek inside your shiny new virtual machines via Web Console or VMRC Client. Only… nothing happens. No console, no love, no joy. Just a blank stare and a silent scream. Don’t worry — it’s not you, it’s your certificates. Turns out, VCF Automation 9… Read More »