Lifecycle management is one of the most complicated components of Kubernetes. In a past article, we showed how to modify a cluster to change the type and size of its nodes. In this post, we will explain how to upgrade the Kubernetes version of a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster when there is a new release. And the best part is that it’s all done in just a few easy steps using the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service for vSphere.

The third update release for 2020 of our VMware Management Pack for Operations Manager is now released. Improvements include better performance, extended discoveries of properties, and vSAN monitoring. We also simplified the configuration and licensing experience and moved everything under the administration pane. This will require you to remove the old Licensing UI Management Packs before upgrading.

This post is part of a series that examines some of the fundamentals of creating, utilizing, and managing Tanzu Kubernetes clusters with the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service for vSphere. If you need a primer to understand the basic concepts, make sure you read vSphere 7 — Introduction to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters. And if you haven’t already, this would also be a good time to read An Elevated View of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service Architecture, the first post in the series.

You have management software that you’ve used for your Linux or Windows servers. Can’t you just deploy a Linux agent and monitor a VMware vSphere/ESX server, or a Windows agent to monitor a Microsoft Hyper-V server? This is a very common question that comes up in any discussion on VMware monitoring and virtualization management. After all, when a VMware ESX server boots, the administrator gets to a Linux login prompt and can login to a Linux operating system.

If you were thinking that nothing will change in your VMware data centre in the following years, think again. Data centre storage is experiencing a paradigm shift. Software-defined storage solutions, such as Ceph, bring flexibility and reduce operational costs. As a result, Ceph storage on VMware has the potential to revolutionise VMware clusters where SAN (Storage Area Network) was the incumbent for many years.

VMware vSphere 7, the new generation of vSphere was released in April 2020. This major new release brings a massive improvement in the work experience of vSphere administrators. If you work with VMware you probably noticed many exciting new features released in vSphere 7. ​ Many of them are a bit out-of-scope for this blog post as we will primarily focus on monitoring. If you want to learn all about the latest VMware vSphere 7 release, I recommend checking out their blog.

Once an app is launched to market, it’s up to the engineering team to ensure that it continues to meet its SLAs. See how we use VMware Tanzu Observability (Wavefront) and Sentry to proactively monitor and fix issues before they become production problems. Every engineering leader has experienced the anxiety and stress of taking an app to production. It’s a mix of excitement and trepidation – your creation will be used in real life, but what if something goes wrong?