Undoubtedly vSphere with Tanzu is the greatest innovation brought to vSphere in years, deeply integrating Kubernetes within the platform, enabling all of you to consume K8s, Pods and VMs side by side in an agile and integrated way without compromising governance.
I’ve been demoing Workload Management Cluster (WMC) feature and all its beauty to my customers, but one thing always missing, mostly because of time constraints, is showing how to enable WMC on the cluster.
So, I took some videos for future references.
If you remember, when vSphere 7 was first released, NSX-T was a requirement to enable WMC, because it's the technology providing pod to pod communication and services, like Load Balancer to the cluster.
So the first video is showing how to enable WMC with NSX-T.
Be mindful that before I had to take care of NSX-T implementation and requirements as listed here.
Starting with vSphere Update 1, you can connect your cluster directly to your vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) and use independent Load Balancer, allowing a broader reach of vSphere users without the need of NSX-T.
This way pod-to-pod communication will be handled by Antrea CNI and services will follow through HAProxy, which is the first independent load balancer supported.
This model is a good fit for entry level users, PoCs
and Labs, mostly because HAProxy lacks some enterprise features for a
Production implementation, here's a basic comparison.
Here’s the video enabling WMC with HAProxy.
As imagined, I had to take care of HAProxy implementation and requirements as well.
Most recently VMware released vSphere Update 2, with an alternative option to HAProxy.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer became the second supported independent Load Balancer to vSphere with Tanzu, a real enterprise grade solution.
Unfortunately I don’t have the video, yet, so keep watching for some updates over here.
*************************************************************************
****** Updated information - May 13, 2021 ******
****** Enabling WMC on NSX Adv. Load Balancer ****** *************************************************************************
