Upgrade of a K3s Lightweight Kubernetes Cluster

K3s is a lightweight, highly available open source Kubernetes cluster platform designed for easy and resource-efficient installation. K3s is provided in a package of less than 60 MB. The package is optimized for ARM platforms and can therefore also be run on hardware such as a Raspberry Pi, or as a guest VM on ESXi-on-ARM.

Prerequisites and collection of information

K3s is a cluster solution. That is why the order in which the nodes are updated is important. The update starts on the master node. So first we need to find out which node has this role. The easiest way to do this is with a kubectl command:

kubectl get node

NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
k3node1.lab.local Ready master 2y43d v1.19.3+k3s3
k3node2.lab.local Ready none 2y42d v1.19.3+k3s3
k3node3.lab.local Ready none 2y42d v1.19.3+k3s3

From the output above we see my three K3s nodes with FQDN, status, role, age and version. So here k3node1 has the master role.

As an alternative, you can also execute the command in verbose mode:

kubectl get node -o wide

28. June 202227. June 2022

Project Arctic – Delivering Benefits of the Cloud to On-Prem Workloads

In the last few years we’ve seen a clear trend to adopt cloud strategies on customer side. Some already pusue a multi cloud strategy to get the most benefit from different offerings. But we may not forget, that infrastructure on-premises – the so called private cloud – is still the most common kind of virtual infrastructure. This is no surprise because on-premises infrastructure has without doubt some advantages. It’s not alone aspects of data privacy, data security and data sovereignty. There are also performance aspects such as low latency that keep customers from migration special workloads to the (public) cloud.

On the other hand there are some advantages of cloud offerings too. Such as flexible consumption, minimal maintenance, built in resilience, developer agility and the possibility to manage from anywhere.

To bridge the gap between on-premises needs and cloud based offerings, VMware has announced Project Arctic during VMworld 2021. Delivering benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads.

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

24. June 202224. June 2022

VMware NSX Legacy Load Balancing is Going Away – Migrate to Avi

VMware will be sunsetting the NSX native load balancers. Customers should be migrating to the currently supported NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) which simplifies operations today while getting you ready for your multi-cloud and container strategies tomorrow. Avi works across all environments beyond the NSX framework, expanding use cases to public cloud, containers and app security while adding capabilities for GSLB, WAF and analytics. A migration tool will be available to make the migration of your existing configuration to the current technology easy and painless.

17. May 202215. March 2024

vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3e released

VMware has released a patch update 3e for vCenter. This is a maintenance release and primarily adds updates for vSphere with Tanzu. There are also separate release notes for vSphere with Tanzu.

What’s New?

Added Network Security Policy support for VMs deployed via VM operator service – Security Policies on NSX-T can be created via Security Groups based on Tags. It is now possible to create NSX-T based security policy and apply it to VMs deployed through VM operator based on NSX-T tags.
Supervisor Clusters Support Kubernetes 1.22 – This release adds the support of Kubernetes 1.22 and drops the support for Kubernetes 1.19. The supported versions of Kubernetes in this release are 1.22, 1.21, and 1.20. Supervisor Clusters running on Kubernetes version 1.19 will be auto-upgraded to version 1.20 to ensure that all your Supervisor Clusters are running on the supported versions of Kubernetes.

Check before update

If you upgraded vCenter Server from a version prior to 7.0 Update 3c and your Supervisor Cluster is on Kubernetes 1.9.x, the tkg-controller-manager pods go into a CrashLoopBackOff state, rendering the guest clusters unmanageable

Read KB 88443 for a workaround.

Test K8s Version

Make sure you’re on a supported K8s version.

Menu > Workload Management > Subervisor Clusters

The image above indicates we’re already on version 1.21, which is good for an update.

Update

Before updating your VCSA make sure you have a configuration backup! An optional VM snapshot is a good idea too. It might help to revert settings fast in case something goes wrong.

You can either apply the update from VAMI or from the shell. The image below shows an overview of the new packages with this update.

After the update is installed you will have an option to deploy a new Kubernetes version in your Supervisor Control Plane.