Mission-Control on The IT Hollow

Tanzu Mission Control - Attach Clusters

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:00:00 +0000

What do you do if you’ve already provisioned some Kubernetes clusters before you got Tanzu Mission Control? Or maybe you’re inheriting some new clusters through an acquisition? Or a new team came on board and were using their own installation? Whatever the case, Tanzu Mission Control will let you manage a conformant Kubernetes cluster but you must first attach it.

Attach An Existing Cluster

For this example, I’ll be attaching a pre-existing Kubernetes cluster on vSphere infrastructure. This cluster was deployed via kubeadm as documented in this previous article about deploying Kubernetes on vSphere.

Tanzu Mission Control - Cluster Upgrade

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes releases a new minor version every quarter and updating your existing clusters can be a chore. With updates coming at you pretty quickly and new functionality being added all the time, having a way to upgrade your clusters is a must, especially if you are managing multiples of clusters. Tanzu Mission Control can take the pain out of upgrading these clusters.

It should be mentioned that the cluster upgrade procedure only works for clusters that were previously deployed through Tanzu Mission Control. If an existing cluster is attached to TMC after deployment, these cluster lifecycle steps won’t work.

Tanzu Mission Control - Deploying Clusters

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:00:00 +0000

I’ve written about deploying clusters in the past, but if you are a TMC customer, those steps can be skipped altogether. TMC will let us deploy a Kubernetes cluster and add it to management, all from the GUI or CLI.

For this example, I’ll create a new Kubernetes cluster within my AWS account. Before we setup the cluster, we need to configure access to our AWS Account so that TMC can manage resources for us.

Tanzu Mission Control - Resize Clusters

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 18:00:00 +0000

A pretty common task that a Kubernetes administrator must do is to resize the cluster. We need more nodes to handle more workloads, or we’ve overprovisioned a cluster and are trying to save costs. This usually took some custom automation scripts such as node autoscaler, or it was done manually based on request.

Tanzu Mission Control can resize our cluster very simply from the TMC portal.

Scale Out a Cluster

Within the TMC Portal, find the cluster that needs to be resized. Within the cluster screen, find the “Node pools” menu. Node pools define the worker nodes that are part of the Kubernetes cluster thats been deployed.