vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part1 - Prerequisites

In this blog series, I would like to share my experience deploying vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T 3.0 networking. Following is a very high-level workflow of setting up the environment from scratch:

Software versions used for this study:

• vSphere 7 U1
• NSX-T 3.0.1.1

If you are using VCF, some of the deployment steps mentioned above are already automated. But, VCF is not in the scope of this blog series, and this post is aimed at explaining the workflow and background configurations that are required to prepare the environment before enabling workload management. This will be useful to understand the backend configuration tasks and logical workflow and will be helpful in case of troubleshooting too. In my lab, I have 4 Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers connected to 2 TOR switches with 2 uplinks from each server. This is a consolidated architecture where both management components and application workload run on the same 4 node vSAN cluster. I am using ESXi 7 U1 and VCSA 7 U1. Here, the TORs are acting as L3 switches and we are doing BGP peering between TOR switches and NSX-T T0 Gateway which will be explained in a later part of this blog series.

Network connectivity

IP address schema and VLANs

I will not be covering how to create VLANs, configuring switch ports, deploying a vSAN cluster, etc. I assume that the network switches are correctly configured and the vSAN cluster is up and running. The next step is to deploy an NSX-T 3.0 appliance. You can either deploy it as a single node or in HA using 3 NSX-T appliances. In my lab, I have only one NSX-T 3.0 instance. Following are some of the reference material to deploy NSX-T 3.0:

https://vmarena.com/how-to-install-nsx-t-3-0-data-center-appliance-step-by-step/

https://www.vstellar.com/2020/08/05/nsx-t-3-0-seriespart-1-management-control-plane-setup/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3cuN4h2qE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa9rE3_7AcA

In the next part I will walk you through the NSX-T configuration tasks. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

References

https://shuttletitan.com/nsx-t/nsx-t-installation-series/journey-to-nsx-t-vcp-nv-and-beyond-nsx-t-installation-series/

https://vxplanet.com/2020/04/25/nsx-t-3-0-edge-cluster-automated-deployment-and-architecture-in-vcf-4-0-part-1/

https://www.udemy.com/course/vmware-nsxt-fundamentals/

VMware PowerCLI 101 - part8 - Working with vSAN

This article explains how to work with vSAN resources using PowerCLI. 

Note I am using the following versions:
PowerShell: 5.1.14393.3866
VMware PowerCLI: 12.1.0.17009493

Connect to vCenter:
Connect-VIServer <IP of vCenter server>

List all vSAN get cmdlets:
Get-Command Get-Vsan*

vSAN runtime info:
$c = Get-Cluster Cluster01
Get-VsanRuntimeInfo -Cluster $c

vSAN space usage:
Get-VsanSpaceUsage

vSAN cluster configuration:

Get-VsanClusterConfiguration

vSAN disk details:

Get-VsanDisk

View all properties of a disk:

(Get-VsanDisk)[31] | select *

View disk vendor, model, firmware revision, physical location, operational state:

(Get-VsanDisk)[31].ExtensionData

 vSAN disk group details:

Get-VsanDiskGroup

Get all properties of a disk group:

Use "extensiondata" property to get more details about cache and capacity tiers:

Cache tier details: 

(Get-VsanDiskGroup)[0].ExtensionData.Ssd

Capacity tier details:

(Get-VsanDiskGroup)[0].ExtensionData.NonSsd

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts

VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part1 - Installing the module and working with stand-alone ESXi host
VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part2 - Working with vCenter server
VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part3 - Basic VM operations
VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part4 - Snapshots
VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part5 - Real time storage IOPS and latency
VMware PowerCLI 101 - part6 - vSphere networking
VMware PowerCLI 101 - part7 - Working with vROps

Monitoring Tanzu Kubernetes cluster using Prometheus and Grafana

Updated: June 26, 2021

In this post, we will see how to deploy Prometheus and Grafana using Helm and Prometheus Operator to monitor Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. 

Following is my Tanzu K8s cluster setup:

Install Helm 3

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 > get_helm.sh

chmod 700 get_helm.sh

./get_helm.sh

Install Prometheus Operator using Helm

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts

helm repo update

helm install pro-mon -n pro-mon prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

Verify all

Port forward Grafana to 3000 to access the dashboards

Login to Grafana using a web browser at localhost:3000/login .

The default username is "admin" and the password is "prom-operator".

Go to Dashboards - Manage to view/ access the list of out-of-the-box K8s dashboards. The following are some of the sample dashboards.

Kubernetes | Compute Resources | Namespace (Pods)

Kubernetes | Networking | Namespace (Pods)

Kubernetes | API server

This is not limited to just Tanzu K8s clusters. You can also monitor OpenShift and Upstream K8s clusters following this method. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

References

https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack
[www.bogotobogo.com] Docker_Kubernetes_Prometheus_Deploy_using_Helm_and_Prometheus_Operator

Kubernetes 101 - Part3 - Install kubectl on Windows

This article shows how to install kubectl on a Windows machine and connect to a remote Kubernetes cluster.

Open PowerShell as administrator and run the following:

Install-Script -Name install-kubectl -Scope CurrentUser -Force

This will download the installation files to Windows PowerShell script folder of the current user. In my case it is: C:\Users\vineetha\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Scripts

Now browse to the above location in Powershell and execute the install-kubectl.ps1 file.

install-kubectl.ps1 [-DownloadLocation <path>]

Note: If you do not specify a DownloadLocation, kubectl will be installed in the user's temp directory.