Cloud Native

Up until recently I’ve been running a Windows Server Core VM with Active Directory, DNS and Certificate Services deployed to provide some core features in my home lab. However, I’ve also been conscious that running a lab on old hardware doesn’t exactly have much in the way of green credentials. So, in an effort to reduce my carbon footprint (and electricity bill) I’ve been looking for ways to shut down my lab when it’s not in use.

I run quite a few applications in Docker as part of my home network - there’s a small selection below, but at any one time there might be 10-15 more apps I’m playing around with: plex - Streaming media server unifi - Ubiquiti Network Controller homebridge - Apple Homekit compatible smart home integration influxdb - Open source time series database grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring pihole - internet tracking and ad blocker vault - Hashicorp secret management Until recently a single PhotonOS VM with Docker was all I needed to run - everything shared the same host IP, stored it’s configuration locally or on an NFS mount and generally ran fine.

I’ve done a fair amount of work learning VMware PKS and NSX-T, but I wanted to drop down a level and get more familiar with the inner workings for Kubernetes, as well as explore some of the newer features that are exposed by the NSX Container Plugin that are not yet in the PKS integrations. The NSX-T docs are…not great, I certainly don’t think you can work out the steps required from the official NCP installation guide without a healthy dollop of background knowledge and familiarity with Kubernetes and CNI.

When I started my blog back in May 2007 (12 years ago!) I was running Wordpress, then switched to DotNetNuke, then BlogEngine, then finally back to Wordpress - which I’ve used since 2010. Today I’ve cut over to a new architecture based on Hugo and hosted on AWS using a combination of Route53, Cloudfront and S3. Why the change? If it ain’t broke… You may well ask why I’ve made the move, or you may not…I’m going to tell you anyway…

Yesterday, Pivotal Container Service 1.1 dropped and, as it’s something I’ve been actively learning in my lab, I wanted to jump on the upgrade straight away. PKS with NSX-T is a really hot topic right now and I think it’s going to be a big part of the future CNA landscape. My Lab PKS 1.0.4 deployment is configured as a “NO-NAT with Logical Switch (NSX-T) Topology” as depicted in the diagram below (from the PKS documentation).

It will be no surprise, given my impending move to the VMware PSO NSX Practice, that this morning I’ve been focussing on NSX-T. The two sessions I attended were the Introduction to NSX-T Architecture and Integrating NSX-T with Kubernetes. In a weird twist of scheduling, the Kubernetes session was before the introduction session, but it worked out OK. I found the Kubernetes session really enjoyable and really felt like the speakers delivered a great overview of the integration and how they work together.

One of the cool new features released with vRealize Automation 7.2 was the integration of VMware Admiral (container management) into the product, and recently VMware made version 1 of vSphere Integrated Containers generally available (GA), so I thought it was time I started playing around with the two. In this article I’m going to cover deploying VIC to my vSphere environment and then adding that host to the vRA 7.2 container management.