My IT Blog

Fixing Tanzu Kubernetes Pod to External Services Connectivity Issues with NSX-T Last month I got a call from a customer who was pulling their hair out over a networking issue. They had just deployed VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on their vSphere with Tanzu environment, everything looked good in the dashboards, all pods were running, but their applications inside the pods could not reach external databases running on traditional VMs in the same datacenter. The frustrating part was that some pods could reach external services perfectly fine, while others would just timeout. There was no clear pattern. Let me tell you how we figured this out and fixed it. The Initial Problem Here is what the customer setup looked like: vSphere 8.0 with Tanzu enabled NSX-T 4.1.2 for networking Three Tanzu Kubernetes clusters running different microservices applications External PostgreSQL database running on traditional VMs (non-Kubernetes) External API services running on another se...

A Practical Architect's View on Integrating AI Capabilities into VMware Cloud Foundation VMware Cloud Foundation AI Integration Intelligent Operations Enterprise Architecture The biggest challenge enterprises face today is not just managing infrastructure at scale, but making intelligent decisions about it. Every day, our VMware environments generate millions of data points about performance, capacity, security, and health. The question is no longer whether we have enough data. The real question is whether we have the intelligence to act on it before problems impact our business. Having worked with VMware infrastructure for several years now, I have seen this pattern repeat itself across organizations. We build sophisticated monitoring systems. We create detailed dashboards. We write comprehensive runbooks. But when an incident happens at 2 AM, we still depend on a tired engineer to connect the dots between disparate signals and make the right call under ...

How Policy as Code, Agentic AI, and Private LLMs Enable Compliant Innovation at Enterprise Scale For CTOs and enterprise architects facing the dual mandate of accelerating innovation while maintaining security posture, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do it without compromising data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, or operational stability. The answer lies in combining three powerful patterns: Infrastructure as Code with GitOps, policy driven guardrails, and private AI deployments on VMware Cloud Foundation. Having architected infrastructure for regulated environments where compliance is non negotiable, I have learned that the key to safe innovation is not restricting what teams can do, but controlling how they do it. GitOps provides the control plane. VCF provides the secure substrate. And private AI capabilities enable intelligence without data exfiltration. The GitOps Foundation for Enterprise Infrastructure GitOps is not just about u...

In the era of digital transformation, businesses are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud strategies to leverage the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency of both private and public cloud environments. VMware and Microsoft Azure are two leading platforms that, when combined, offer a robust solution for hybrid cloud deployments.  This article provides an in-depth guide on migrating workloads from an on-premises VMware environment to Azure, complete with practical examples and strategic insights. Understanding the Hybrid Cloud Advantage Hybrid cloud environments allow organizations to integrate on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, offering several benefits: Flexibility : Easily scale resources based on demand. Cost Efficiency : Optimize costs by balancing workloads between private and public clouds. Disaster Recovery : Ensure business continuity with robust backup and recovery solutions. For Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), investing in a well-planned migrati...

In our previous posts , we saw the option to deploy the VCH using CLI utility, vSphere client etc. In this post, we see an option to automate the VCH deployment using vRealize Automation ( vRA) Background:  The current automated world requires the seamless and fastest deployment of its infrastructure. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers gives developers an essential tool for streamlining the process of building and running containerized applications in production.  The deployment of VCH is done through various methods as we see in our previous posts. But in this post, we are going to see how to automate the VCH deployment and the first VCH in few mouse clicks. By using the service catalog in vRealize Automation to provision Virtual Container Hosts on-demand as a ticketless offer, you can make your developers self-sufficient. The vRealize Automation 7.4 and later versions support provisioning and management of Virtual Container Hosts(VCH) for running vSphere Integrated...

Virtual Container Host Deployment using the "vic-machine" Utility - VMware Integrated Containers In our previous posts , we saw the steps to deploy VIC appliance and deploying the VCH from vSphere client. In this post, we will see the steps to deploy the VCH using the "vic-machine" CLI Utility  Refernce: https://github.com/rdjagadeesh/vic_homelab/ Once we deploy the vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) appliance, access the VIC appliance IP from the browser and we land on the below page. From this page, we can download the vSphere Integrated Containers Engine bundle from the appliance and unpack it on the workstation/laptop/ jump host where we connect to our vSphere environment. Unpack the downloaded bundle  The bundle included the following contents and utilities   The VIC bundle includes the vic-machine CLI utility. We use "vic-machine" to deploy and manage virtual container hosts (VCHs) at the command line. Procedure:  ...