Avi Portal - Bad Service

Oh my! I wasn’t expecting a three-part series as an outcome of my recent homelab crash, but here we are 😄 Check out my recent posts Database Resurrection - Reviving vPostgres DB on VMware vCenter Server and Fixing vCenter Postgres Archiver Service - Dead Postgres Replication Slot on my made experiences with recovering the vCenter Server database.

Actually, I thought I was “out of the woods” with fixiing the broken but unfortunately my Avi Controller was also affected from the outage.

Of course I run Backups 🤥

This time I had luck with the outcome of my recent homelab crash. If I weren’t able to fix my broken vCenter Server, as described in my previous article, I would have had to reinstall my vSphere (+ vSAN, + Tanzu) environment basically from scratch again.

Is this actually true?

Actually NO! Because if I would have configured my vSphere environment correctly, vCenter Server file-based backup were configured properly and I wouldn’t have had to worry about the consequences in the end.

Power Failure causes Problems again

Once in a while power failures happen and can (mostly will!) cause troubles for small homelabs like mine. I’m running a two-node vSAN cluster on two Supermicro SYS-E200-8D servers. My vSAN Witness Appliance is running on a small Intel NUC, which is perfectly suited for this use case. The vCenter Server is still running on the vSAN cluster but only compute-wise. I have a Synology NAS running as well which is providing an additional NFS datastore in order to have at least the VCSA (VM) storage outsourced from the cluster.

Knative 💙

In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern software architecture, event-driven systems have emerged as a pivotal paradigm, empowering organizations to create highly responsive, scalable, and adaptable applications. Knative stands at the forefront of this revolution, offering a robust and flexible framework for building event-driven architectures (EDA) that seamlessly integrate diverse components, enhance automation, and enable real-time data processing.

I’m evangelizing and supporting the Knative project for a longer time already. I recently had the pleasure to demonstrate parts of its comprehensive feature set at the great ContainerDays event in beautiful Hamburg, Germany.

Hybrid Application Architectures

As technology advances at a rapid pace, the landscape of application development continues to evolve. The demand for agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness has given rise to a new breed of architectures that seamlessly integrate modern cloud-native principles with established traditional workloads. One such paradigm that has gained significant traction is the hybrid application architecture, which combines the power of microservice architectures with the reliability and versatility of virtual machines (VMs).

Recap and Intro

In Part I and II of my blog series on the Supervisor Services in vSphere with Tanzu (TKG with Supervisor Model), I covered the topics from registering and installing a new service on a Supervisor Cluster until how to leverage a service for functionalities like e.g. hosting container images (Registry Service) or handling incoming traffic (Ingress Service) for vSphere Pod based applications.

Recap and Intro

In Part I of my blog series on the Supervisor Services in vSphere with Tanzu (TKGS), I introduced the overall concept, the idea, the requirements as well as how to register and install a new Supervisor Service in vSphere.

Read HERE

Furthermore, I covered the feature vSphere Pods and how they come to beneficial use for the Supervisor Services.

Read HERE

In this second part, I’m going to demonstrate how the Kubernetes Ingress Controller Service (Contour) will be used for serving a vSphere Pod based web-shop application with Ingress functionalities. Also, I’m going over the NSX-side of the house in terms of networking, the distributed firewall as well as troubleshooting when using vSphere Pods in TKGS.

To begin with, if you are familiar with vSphere Pods in general, you can skip the first chapter of this post and directly go to the chapter Supervisor Services.

Recap - Embed Containers and Kubernetes into vSphere

When VMware released vSphere 7 back in 2020, it was announced that under the hood a lot of architectural efforts flowed into VMware’s core platform. These efforts had to be done in order to embed containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, to unify them with virtual machines as first class citizens.

Using Windows Fileserver shares in Kubernetes? This post introduce how this can be achieved by installing and using the SMB CSI driver for Kubernetes.

The open-source container registry Harbor supports the configuration of webhook endpoints. Harbor notifies the webhook endpoint of certain events that occur in a project. However, the event sent is not delivered as a CloudEvent. By leveraging the power of VEBA/Knative the non-CloudEvent can be send to a webhook function to get transformed in a CloudEvent. By transforming the event, other functions can be subscribed to the new event to ultimately get triggered. As a use case for it, I'm going to describe how ChatOps can be enabled using event-driven automation.