Month: January 2023

Container Service Extension 4.0 on VCD 10.x – Part 2: NSX Advanced Load Balancer Configuration

Manish Jha

In part 1 of this blog series, I discussed Container Service Extension 4.0 platform architecture and a high-level overview of a production-grade deployment. This blog post is focused on configuring NSX Advanced Load Balancer and integrating it with VCD. 

I will not go through each and every step of the deployment & configuration as I have already written an article on the same topic in the past. I will discuss the configuration steps that I took to deploy the topology that is shown below.

Let me quickly go over the NSX-T networking setup before getting into the NSX ALB configuration.

I have deployed a new edge cluster on a dedicated vSphere cluster for traffic separation. This edge cluster resides in my compute/workload domain. The NSX-T manager managing the edges is deployed in my management domain. 

On the left side of the architecture, you can see I have one Tier-0 gateway, and VRFs carved out for NSX ALB and CSE networking.… Read More

Container Service Extension 4.0 on VCD 10.x – Part 1: Introduction & Architecture

Manish Jha

Introduction

VMware Container Service is an extension to VMware Cloud Director which enables cloud providers to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service to their tenants. CSE helps tenants quickly deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters in their virtual data centers in just a few clicks directly from the tenant portal. By using VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension, customers can also use Tanzu products and services such as Tanzu Mission Control to manage their clusters.

Container Service Extension (CSE) has come a long way and with each release, the product is getting better and better. Folks who have worked on the older versions of CSE knows how painful it the setup process was and involved too many manual steps. With CSE 4.0, the provider workflow is simplified and the installation can be done in less than 30 minutes. Kudos to the CSE engineering team.

CSE 4.0 Benefits

I want to list a few benefits that CSE 4.0 offers before getting into the architecture.… Read More