Blog Date: December 2, 2021
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3.1 Used During Deployment.

In my previous post, I described how to deploy vSphere with Tanzu on a VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3.1 instance. In this post I will describe how to configure your first namespace.

Procedure:

Access the vSphere client. Select Menu > Workload Management > Namespaces.

Click Create Namespace.

Expand the inventory tree and select the compute cluster.

As am example, you can enter namespace-01 as your namespace name. (The name must be in a DNS-compliant format (a-z, 0-9, -)).

Click Create. ( The namespace is created and shows a Config Status of Running and a Kubernetes Status of Active.)

Select the Don’t show for future workloads check box.

Click Got It.

Now we can move on to the next section and apply permissions, storage and VM class.

1. Click Add Permissions
   1. Identity source: <make selection>
   2. User/Group Search: <customer specific>. In this example, I have created a vsphere.local account. You can easily use an active directory account or group here.
   3. Role: <customer specific>. In this example, I have chosen “can edit” that way I can create and destroy things inside the namespace.
   4. Click Ok
   5. (Rinse-wash-repeat as necessary)

Click Add Storage and add the storage policy. 

The namespace is configured with a storage policy and user permissions.  The assigned storage policy is translated to a Kubernetes storage class.

Under VM Service, click Add VM Class. Here we need to associate a VM class with the namespace, that will allow developers to self-service VMs in the namespace. This gives vSphere administrators flexibility with resources available in the cluster. In this example, best-effort-xsmall was chosen because this is a nested lab environment. You should work with your developers to determine the best sizing strategy for the containerized workloads.

Now that the Namespace, Storage, and VM Class policies have all been defined, your window should look something like:

That’s it. Technically we can start deploying workloads to the new namespace. However, because I am already logged into vSphere, I like to enable the embedded Harbor registry. In my next post, I’ll go over the simple process of how to enable the embedded harbor registry.