vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part13 - Export WCP admin kubeconfig

In the previous posts we discussed the following:

Part1 - Prerequisites

Part2 - Configure NSX

Part3 - Edge Cluster

Part4 - Tier-0 Gateway and BGP peering

Part5 - Tier-1 Gateway and Segments

Part6 - Create tags, storage policy, and content library

Part7 - Enable workload management

Part8 - Create namespace and deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

Part9 - Monitoring

Part10 - Upgrade Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

Part11 - Troubleshooting TKC

Part12 - Deploy application on TKC and access it

This article shows the steps to export WCP admin kubeconfig file from the supervisor control plane VM. This is the admin kubeconfig file that can be used to manage the Supervisor/ WCP K8s cluster.

Step1: SSH as root to the vCenter server.

Step2: Run the script /usr/lib/vmware-wcp/decryptK8Pwd.py and make a note of the IP and PWD.

Step3: SSH as root to the IP that you noted down from previous step, and then provide the password that you got from step2.

Step4: You can now copy the admin kubeconfig file from /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf file to your local machine. Make sure to modify the field server: https://127.0.0.1:6443 in your local admin.conf file to the IP that you got from step2 (server: https://IP_from_step2:6443). 

Note: If you are managing multiple WCP clusters, you can merge all the kubeconfig files. Refer this blog by Jacob Tomlinson for more details. 

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

ESXi in a HA cluster fails to Enter Maintenance Mode and gets stuck

Recently we came across a situation where when we try to put a ESXi host in Maintenance Mode, it is getting stuck at certain level. These ESXi nodes were part of a vSphere with Tanzu 7 U3 cluster. While troubleshooting we noticed that there are some VMs that are either orphaned or inaccessible running on it. We deleted those orphaned and inaccessible VMs and then the ESXi node enters Maintenance Mode successfully.

You can use VMware PowerCLI to list those orphaned and inaccessible VMs.

(Get-VMHost <host_fqdn> | Get-VM | Where {$_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "orphaned"}) | select Name,Id,PowerState

(Get-VMHost <host_fqdn> | Get-VM | Where {$_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "inaccessible"}) | select Name,Id,PowerState

We then deleted those orphaned and inaccessible VMs. You can try to delete them using Remove-VM command. 

Remove-VM -VM <vm_name> -DeletePermanently 

If that does not work, you can try with dcli.

dcli> com vmware vcenter vm delete --vm <vm-id>


Hope it was useful.