Well… it’s been a while.

I looked back and realised the last time I posted here was July 2022—almost three years ago! It’s hard to believe how quickly that time has flown. Consider this post a signal of intent: I’m planning to start publishing content here once again.

So, why did I stop?

It’s a fair question. The truth is, I didn’t stop creating content—I just stopped publishing it here.

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited to attend a VMware Multi-Cloud course at VMware UK HQ in Staines.

Multi-Cloud Builder

The course took place over 4 days and was very well structured.

Initialy, we were given the VMware vision on Multi-Cloud and then we were straight into the “good stuff” hands-on-labs. This would be a consistent and well executed theme for the 4 days.

VMware now have an impressive global cloud presence utilising their partnerships with major hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and several others. You can see from the list below VMware are serious about this Multi-Cloud journey.

VMWorld, sorry VMware Explore has been and gone and seemed to go very smoothly, there were several announcements but the big one for me was Aria.

VMware Aria (formerly vRealize Cloud Management)

Cloud management that unifies applications, infrastructure, and services across private, hybrid, and public clouds in a single platform with a common data model.

With the VMware Aria launch, we are unifying VMware Cloud Management in four key respects:

It’s hard to believe that my first VMworld was almost 9 years ago! I feel very blessed to have attended in 2014 (EU) , 2015 (EU) , 2016 (US) , 2017 (EU) , 2018 (my first as an employee), 2019 (my first time as a speaker!), and virtually in 2020 and 2021.

Over the years VMworld has been hugely formative in my career, I’ve talked many times before about how the trajectory of my career really took off when I got involved with the London VMUG, and how that led to being awarded vExpert in 2013. Through the vExpert programme, I got my first blogger pass for VMworld, and from there the networking opportunities led to certification, career advances, and ultimately making the contacts (and friends) that got me in the door at VMware. It’s hard to overstate how much VMworld has helped over the years.

Recently I stumbled upon a limitation in VCF that isn’t very clearly documented, and while not an issue you would regularly come accross. It is an import limitation to be aware of if you plan to adjust your pNIC configuration of any VCF hosts post deployment/commisioning.

The Problem

We have a few customers who will not be able to commision their new hosts with the desired pNIC configuration due to current hardware availability. The availability of the pNICs due to global supply challenges has meant severe delays in availability.

On the 10th February VCF 4.4 was released, this was quite a significant milestone as it removed a few things from the equation and also provided more flexbility.

Firstly and arguably the big change.

vRealize Suite

vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.6.2, upgrade and deployment of the vRealize Suite products is managed by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. You can upgrade vRealize Suite products as new versions become available in your vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager will only allow upgrades to compatible and supported versions of vRealize Suite products. Specific vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and Workspace ONE Access versions will no longer be listed in the VMware Cloud Foundation BOM.

In my previous post I walked through configuring kubernetes ingress with automatically generated SSL certificates and DNS registration using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid’s Packages. Another of the packaged applications available is Fluent-bit, which enables log forwarding from your Kubernetes cluster and workloads to a range of supported logging endpoints.

There are a couple of tweaks required in order to forward logs to vRealize Automation Log Insight Cloud. We need to use the HTTP output in the Fluent Bit configuration to forward the logs as a JSON payload to the Log Insight API. We also need to append an authentication header with an API key, and configure some tags so that the Tanzu Kubnernetes Grid Content Pack will pick up the logs.

So, you’ve set up your shiny new Workload Management on vSphere, created a Namespace and deployed a cluster…now what?! When you deploy a workload cluster from Workload Management on vSphere 7, it comes with basic functionality, but in order to start running workloads you will inevitably need to install additional tools. That’s where Tanzu’s Packages come into play.

Tanzu’s User Managed Packages are based on a project called Carvel which:

I am blessed to be working for a great employer, and while COVID had a significant impact everywhere, from a work point of view, I have never been busier.

Because we are growing as an organisation, opportunities are surfacing on a regular basis.

My focus in the last 24 months has shifted from a more project to project focus to now being involved in several projects at once providing project and architectural governance as well as normal consultant duties. This has been challenging but really enjoyable. This means often I am not in the technical “weeds”, and exercising new skills and leaning on past experience.