NSX ALB Upgrade Breaking AKO Integration

Manish Jha

Recently I upgraded NSX ALB from 20.1.4 to 20.1.5 in my lab and observed weird things whenever I attempted to deploy/delete any Kubernetes workload of type LoadBalancer.

The Issue

On deploying a new K8 application, AKO was unable to create a load balancer for the application. In NSX ALB UI, I can see that a pool has been created and a VIP assigned but no VS is present. I have also verified that the ‘ako-essential’ role has the necessary permission “PERMISSION_VIRTUALSERIVCE”  to create any new VS.

On attempting to delete a K8 application, the application got deleted from the TKG side, but it left lingering items (VS, Pools, etc) in the ALB UI. To investigate more on the issue, I manually tried deleting the server pool and captured the output using the browser network inspect option. 

As expected the delete operation failed with the error that the object that you are trying to delete is associated with ‘L4PolicySet’

But the l4policyset was empty

… Read More

Quick Tip – Restricting SSH Access to NSX ALB Service Engines

Manish Jha

By default, the user can connect directly to a Service Engine via SSH using the system’s admin credentials. If there is a security requirement to restrict SSH connection, it is possible to disable this access using the following CLI configuration:

1: Connect to the NSX ALB controller and gain shell access

2: Run the following commands to disable admin SSH access to Service Engine.

Is restricting SSH enough from the security point of view? … Read More

Protecting TKG Workloads with Tanzu Mission Control Data Protection

Manish Jha

Welcome to Part-3 of the getting started with Tanzu Mission Control. In this post, I will discuss how you can leverage Tanzu Mission Control to protect your Kubernetes workloads that are deployed on the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster. 

If you are new to Tanzu Mission Control, I would encourage you to read previous articles of this series before diving into data protection for K8 workloads.

1: Tanzu Mission Control – Introduction & Architecture

2: Managing Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters with TMC

Tanzu Mission Control & Data Protection

Data protection in TMC is provided by Velero which is an open-source project that came with the Heptio acquisition.

When data protection is enabled on a Kubernetes cluster, the data backup is stored external to the TMC. TMC leverages AWS S3 functionality to store the backups. 

Note: Data protection is not enabled on the Kubernetes cluster by default. In this post, I will demonstrate the steps of enabling data protection and the process of backup and restoration of K8 data. … Read More

Integrating Custom Registries with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.3

Manish Jha

Introduction

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid can be configured with a private registry for the rapid deployment of K8 workloads. Although there are a variety of container and artifact registries out there, Harbor has drawn attention because of its accessibility and ease of use, and rich feature set.

Although public registries are out there on the internet, they might contain everything you are looking for. In that case, you can create a custom Harbor registry to push custom K8 images to be used within your organization. A standalone Harbor registry is a perfect use case for an air-gapped TKG deployment.

In my last post, I have documented the steps of deploying a private Harbor registry for TKG. This post will show how you can leverage the registry to push/pull images for your K8 deployment. 

I have created a new project (named manish) in Harbor and I will be pushing images in that custom project.… Read More

Deploying Harbor Registry for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Manish Jha

Introduction

Harbor is an open-source registry that is used to store the containerized images that will be consumed by the Docker/Kubernetes platform. The images stored in the Harbor registry are secured using policies and role-based access control. Harbor, delivers compliance, performance, and interoperability to help you consistently and securely manage artifacts across cloud-native compute platforms like Kubernetes and Docker.

Why harbor

Harbor not only provides a container registry but also can do vulnerability scanning and trust signing of your docker images. It also has a really smooth web interface that allows you to do things like RBAC, project creation, user management, and more.

Harbor supports the replication of images between registries and also offers advanced security features such as user management, access control, and activity auditing. 

Harbor Deployment Model

Harbor can be deployed both as a regular workload or as a K8 instance. Deploying as a K8 instance is very handy if you already have a Kubernetes management cluster.… Read More

Tanzu Mission Control-Part 2-Manage Kubernetes Clusters From TMC

Manish Jha

In the first post of this blog series, I talked about the Tanzu Mission Control solution and the benefits of using it. I also talked about the architecture and components of TMC. Now it’s time to see TMC in action. 

One of the core features of TMC is K8 cluster lifecycle management and in this post, I will walk through the steps of creating and managing the Kubernetes cluster from the TMC portal. Let’s get started.

TMC Login

To use the TMC solution, you must have a subscription to the Tanzu Mission Control cloud service. You can access the TMC portal by logging into your VMware Cloud Service portal and clicking on the VMware Tanzu Mission Control service tile. 

By default, you will land to the Clusters view from where you can create/attach the existing Kubernetes cluster with the TMC portal.

Note: For the purpose of this demonstration, I will be talking only about TKGm and TKGS cluster in this blog post. … Read More

Tanzu Mission Control-Part 1-Introduction & Architecture

Manish Jha

VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services that enables customers to build modern applications on the Kubernetes platform and manage them from a single control point. The Tanzu portfolio is pretty vast and includes products and services like:

1: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

2: vSphere with Tanzu

3: Tanzu Mission Control

In this blog post, I will be talking about what is Tanzu Mission Control and why it is important for you.

What is Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) ?

Tanzu Mission Control is a SaaS offering available through VMware Cloud Services and provides:

  • A centralized platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds.
  • Attach existing Kubernetes Clusters in the TMC portal for centralized operations and management.
  • A Policy Engine that automates Access control and security policies across a fleet of clusters.
  • Manage security across multiple clusters.
  • Centralize authentication and authorization, with federated identity from multiple sources.

Why you need Tanzu Mission Control?

… Read More

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.3 Deployment with NSX ALB in VMC

Manish Jha

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.3 brought many enhancements with it and one of them was the support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer for load balancing the Kubernetes based workloads. TKG with NSX ALB is fully supported in VMC on AWS. In this post, I will talk about the deployment of TKG v1.3 in VMC. 

In this post, I will not cover the steps of NSX ALB deployment as I have already documented it here

Prerequisites

Before starting the TKG deployment in VMC, make sure you have met the following prerequisites:

  • SDDC is deployed in VMC and outbound access to vCenter is configured. 
  • Segments for NSX ALB (Mgmt & VIP) are created.
  • NSX ALB Controllers and Service Engines are deployed and controllers’ initial configuration is completed. 

Deployment Steps

Create Logical Segments & Configure DHCP

Create 2 DHCP enabled logical segments, (one for the TKG Management and one for the TKG Workload) in your SDDC by navigating to Networking & Security > Network > Segments.… Read More

vSphere with Tanzu Integration in VCD

Manish Jha

Overview

Prior to v10.2, VMware Cloud Director supported K8 cluster deployment natively and integrated with ENT-PKS. With the release of v10.2, K8 integration is extended to vSphere with Tanzu. This integration enables Service Providers to create a self-service platform for Kubernetes Clusters that are backed by the vSphere 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0. By using Kubernetes with VMware Cloud Director, you can provide a multi-tenant Kubernetes service to your tenants.

In this article, I will walk through the steps of integrating vSphere with Tanzu with VCD. 

Pre-requisites for Tanzu Integration with VCD

Before using vSphere With Tanzu with VCD, you have to meet the following pre-requisites:

  • VMware Cloud Director appliance deployed & initial configuration completed. Please see VMware’s official documentation on how to install & configure VCD.
  • vCenter 7.0 (or later version) with an enabled vSphere with VMware Tanzu functionality added to VMware Cloud Director. This is done under Resources > Infrastructure Resources > vCenter Server Instances.
… Read More

Global Load Balancing using NSX ALB in VMC

Manish Jha

Overview

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is the method of load balancing applications/workloads that are distributed globally (typically, multiple data centers and public clouds). GSLB enables efficient distribution of traffic across application servers that are dispersed geographically. 

In a production environment, the corporate name server delegates one or more subdomains to NSX ALB GSLB, which then owns these domains, and provides responses to DNS queries from clients. DNS based load balancing is implemented by creating DNS Virtual Service. 

How GSLB Works?

Let’s understand the working of GSLB using the below example. 

There are 2 SDDC’s running in VMC and both the SDDC has local load balancing configured to load balance set of web servers in their respective SDDC. The 2 Virtual Services (SDDC01-Web-VS & SDDC02-Web-VS) have a couple of web servers as pool members and the VIP of the Virtual Service is translating to Public IP via NAT.  

Let’s assume the 4 web servers running across 2 SDDC are servicing the same web application and you are looking for doing a global load balancing along with local load balancing. … Read More