Tag Archives: package

Helm Pac-Man Header

Creating and hosting a Helm Chart package to install Pac-Man on Kubernetes

Kubernetes, , , , ,

If you’ve have been following any of my blogs that relate to Kubernetes, I am sure that you will have seen the use of my demo application Pac-Man, designed to replicate a small production application with a front end UI service, DB back end service and load balancing service.

If not, you can find it here:

In this blog post, I am going to cover how I create a Helm Chart package to install the application on a Kubernetes cluster, and then host it on GitHub so that it can be re-used as necessary between different clusters.

This was on my to-do list for quite a while, as I wanted to explore Helm in more detail and understand how the charts work. What better way to do this than create my own?

What is Helm and why use it?

Helm is a tool that simplifies the installation and lifecycle of Kubernetes applications. As an example, it is a little bit like Brew or Yum for Linux.

Helm uses a package format called charts; these charts are a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources. These charts can range from the simple, deploy a single pod, deployment set, etc, to the complex, deploy a full application made up of Deployments, StatefulSets, PVCs, Ingress, etc.

Helm has become over the years one of the defacto client tools to use for simplification of deploying an application to your Kubernetes environment. Take Kasten for example, to deploy their K10 software, their guide gives you only the Helm commands to do so.

You can install Helm from the below script, for other methods please see their official documentation.

curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3

chmod 700 get_helm.sh

./get_helm.sh
Creating a template Helm Chart

The Helm Client makes it easy to get started from scratch, you can create a template chart by running the following command, which creates a folder of the name you specify, with a number of example files you can use.

helm create {name}

# For this blog post I ran the following

helm create pacman-kubernetes

helm create pacman-kubernetes

In more detail, this structure offers the following: Continue reading Creating and hosting a Helm Chart package to install Pac-Man on Kubernetes →

DMS - vRA Header

Data Management for VMware Tanzu with vRealize Automation as Custom Resources

VMware, , , ,

In this blog post, we will cover the technical configuration to import the packages that myself and Katherine Skilling (Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog) have created.

This work is to show the possibility of creating custom workflows to integrate other products that are not natively supported within vRA, by exploiting Dynamic Types. A further write-up will detail the technical configurations of how this integration was created.

You can read this blog post on how to create Dynamic Types in vRealize Orchestrator to be used as custom resources in vRealize Automation:

Updated Feb 2022 - Includes edits needed to enable compatability with Data Management for VMware Tanzu v1.1
High-Level Overview

This blog post focuses on integrating “Data Management for VMware Tanzu”, you can read more here about this product:

These packages offer the following capabilities:

  • vRA Cloud Assembly Custom Resource for Data Management with VMware Tanzu
    • Create a database instance
    • Delete a database instance (clean up when a deployment is deleted)
    • Day 2 actions for database instance
      • Scale database instance resources
      • Point in Time Backup of database instance
      • Power-On database instance
      • Power-Off database instance
Pre-Requisites
  • Data Management for VMware Tanzu platform deployed and configured
    • Agent appliance deployed and environment configured.
    • Organisation configured with Org Admin user account.
  • vRealize Automation deployed and configured
    • Using embedded vRO will be fine
    • vRA needs to be able to connect to the DMS system over HTTPs, so appropriate routes and firewalls configured.
  • Grab the files from this location
Recording

Below is a 25 minute recording showing you how to implement the documented steps that follow in this blog post.

Importing & Configuring the vRealize Orchestrator packages

From the downloaded files under the folder “vRealize Orchestrator” there is two files:

  • com.vmware.dms.backup.package
  • dms-dynamictypes-config.package

Open the vRealize Orchestrator UI (https://{vro-url}/orchestration-ui)

  • Left-hand navigation pane > Assets > Packages > Import

DMS - vRO import package

  • Select the file name “com.vmware.dms.backup.package”
  • Select to trust the package and click import

Continue reading Data Management for VMware Tanzu with vRealize Automation as Custom Resources →

SynologyLogo

Synology – Moving a package between volumes

Storage, General, , ,

I have a Synology 8-bay NAS used for home-lab purposes, but also doubles as local home storage as well.

As part of upgrades, I was decommissioning a volume for a new one with higher capacity drives, however I had Plex installed on the volume to be decommissioned. I moved all the data using the internal file manager, but the package installation remained in place.

Migrate package to another volume

  1. Stop your application via the Synology package center UI.
  2. Login to Synology using SSH and elevate to root.
  3. Use “ls” against /VolumeX/@appstore to find your package folder name
  4. Use “mv” to move the data between the old and new volume, you may need to create the @appstore folder first.
  5. Remove the symlink from the current volume and create the new symlink to the new volume.
  6. Stop and start your package in the Synology Package Centre.

Below is an example the commands I used;

sudo mkdir /volume2/@appstore
sudo mv "/volume1/@appstore/Plex Media Server" "/volume2/@appstore"
sudo rm "/var/packages/Plex Media Server/target"
sudo ln -s "/volume2/@appstore/Plex Media Server" "/var/packages/Plex Media Server/target"

synology migrate package to new volume veducate.co .uk

Now when you try to remove the volume, your package will now show as attached to the volume.

synology remove volume1synology remove volume2

Regards

Dean

Dean Lewis