Tanzu on The IT Hollow

Configure a Private Registry for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 13:31:53 +0000

A really common task after deploying a Kubernetes cluster is to configure it to use a container registry where the container images are stored. A Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (TKC) is no exception to this rule. vSphere 7 with Tanzu comes with an embedded harbor registry that can be used, but in many cases you all ready have your own container registry and so you’d like to continue using that instead.

vSphere 7 with Tanzu Updates

Thu, 13 May 2021 14:45:54 +0000

At some point, you’ll be faced with an upgrade request. New Kubernetes features, new security patches, or just to maintain your support. A vSphere 7 with Tanzu deployment has several components that may need to be updated and most of which can be updated independently of one another. In this post we’ll walk through an update to vSphere, then update the Supervisor namespace, and then finally the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster.

Customize vSphere 7 with Tanzu Guest Clusters

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:29:00 +0000

Kubernetes clusters can come in many shapes and sizes. Over the past 18 months I’ve deployed quite a few Kubernetes clusters for customers but these clusters all have different requirements. What image registry am I connecting to? Do we need to configure proxies? Will we need to install new certificates to the nodes? Do we need to tweak some containerd configurations? During many of my customer engagements the answer to the above questions is, “yes”.

Enable the Harbor Registry on vSphere 7 with Tanzu

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 21:50:57 +0000

Your Kubernetes clusters are up and running on vSphere 7 with Tanzu and you can’t wait to get started on your first project. But before you get to that, you might want to enable the Harbor registry so that you can privately store your own container images and use them with your clusters. Luckily, in vSphere 7 with Tanzu, the Harbor project has been integrated into the solution. You just have to turn it on and set it up.

Resizing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Nodes

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 15:05:00 +0000

Have you ever missed when trying to properly size an Kubernetes environment? Maybe the requirements changed, maybe there were wrong assumptions, or maybe the project took off and it just needs more resources. Under normal circumstances, I might suggest to you to build a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster and re-deploy your apps. Unfortunately, as much as I want to treat Kubernetes clusters as ephemeral, they can’t always be treated this way. If you need to resize your TKG nodes without re-deploying a new cluster, then keep reading.

Non-Interactive Logins to vSphere 7 with Tanzu Clusters

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

You’ve deployed your first Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters in vSphere 7 and are beyond the learning phase. You’re now ready to start automating your Kubernetes cluster builds, and application deployments.

Typically you’d login to your TKG clusters through the kubectl cli with a command like:

kubectl vsphere login ...

Normally, you’d be right, but that command requires an interactive login, meaning for you to wait for a second prompt to enter a password. The current version of the vSphere plugin doesn’t have an option for non-interactive logins so we need to get creative until this feature is added.

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters on vSphere 7

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 14:15:00 +0000

This post will focus on deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters in your vSphere 7 with Tanzu environment. These TKG clusters are the individual Kubernetes clusters that can be shared with teams for their development purposes.

I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t we already create a Kubernetes cluster when we setup our Supervisor cluster? The short answer is yes. However the Supervisor cluster is a unique Kubernetes cluster that probably shouldn’t be used for normal workloads. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a follow-up post. For now, let’s focus on how to create them, and later we’ll discuss when to use them vs the Supervisor cluster.

vSphere 7 with Tanzu - Getting Started Guide

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:16:18 +0000

VMware released the new version of vSphere with functionality to build and manage Kubernetes clusters. This series details how to deploy, configure, and use a lab running vSphere 7 with Kubernetes enabled.

The instructions within this post are broken out into sections. vSphere 7 requires pre-requisites at the vSphere level as well as a full NSX-T deployment. Follow these steps in order to build your own vSphere 7 with Kubernetes lab and start using Kubernetes built right into vSphere.

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Clusters - vSphere

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:00:00 +0000

VMware recently released the 1.0 release of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which aims at decreasing the difficulty of deploying conformant Kubernetes clusters across infrastructure. This post demonstrates how to use TKG to deploy a management cluster to vSphere.

If you’re not familiar with TKG yet, you might be curious about what a Management Cluster is. The management cluster is used to manage one to many workload clusters. The management cluster is used to spin up VMs on different cloud providers, and lay down the Kubernetes bits on those VMs, thus creating new clusters for applications to be build on top of. TKG is built upon the ClusterAPI project so this post pretty accurately describes the architecture that TKG uses.

Tanzu Mission Control - Access Policies