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...

As per Gartner, 100 percent of Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 companies use VMware , and more than 500,000 customers have saved billions of dollars worldwide. Approximately 85 percent of all virtualized applications run on VMware.  Many companies still rely on their own data centers and manage their IT infrastructure with long-standing, proven solutions from VMware. But many would also like to benefit from the advantages of a public cloud solution, such as high scalability, reliability, and flexible costs. This is made possible with VMware Cloud on AWS . It enables companies to bring their vSphere-based workloads into the public cloud and combine them with modern services from AWS, such as S3 object storage or an RDS database service, if required. Why move to Cloud:  Common scenarios include  1. Company strategy to implement cloud-first mandates 2. Aging infrastructure or major hardware refreshes 3. Expiring contracts or co-location lease expiration 4.  ...

 VMware ON AWS Deployment - Requirements.  As mentioned in the previous post , when we are set with the project objective, we need to prepare the items mentioned in the VMC deployment checklist. Some of the basic requirements are,  The AWS account details - When we deploy our SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS, it is created within an AWS account and a VPC dedicated to your organisation and managed by VMware. We must also connect the SDDC to an AWS account belonging to us, called the customer AWS account . This connection allows our SDDC to access AWS services belonging to our org  account. SDDC Management subnets - This is the most critical part of the deployment. Choosing the right network for SDDC and connect back to ON-Premise network (check with network team to make sure you provide unique range of CIDR, ASN etc to avoid conflicts)  Connectivity to On-Premise DC and VMC - There are different ways to connect to the On-Prem DC, using IPsec VPN, AWS Direct Connect...

I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy   During this pandemic time, I have got a chance to onboard the VMware ON AWS to another location of our business. In this blog series I will share my experience and few tips about VMware ON AWS (VMC). This is purely my view and the intention are to spread the views to the community. If you have any issues, comments, feedback kindly share via email. Let’s get straight to the topic.  Why VMC:  Before we go choose to proceed with VMC, we need to understand and convince ourselves on below items,  Where do we fit this VMC in our existing infrastructure?  How could VMC bring in a value to our business  What workloads or solutions do we plan to run in this VMC?  Do we have a DR requirement? If yes, do we have an existing setup to migrate to VMC or its going to be a new DR setup?  Like this you might have to ask few questions which you might need to address it. When we have a problem statement and ...

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...