Announcing Tanzu Community Edition from VMware

As we head into VMworld 2021 this week, there will be many announcements about new and updated VMware products and features. However, there is one that I want to bring to your attention. It is something that I have been directly involved in, in some small way, and that something is Tanzu Community Edition.  Tanzu Community Edition (sometimes referred to as TCE), is a free, open source Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) distribution which has all of the same open source software found in our commercial editions of Tanzu. Personally, I find this to be a really cool announcement for a number…

VMware Fusion 12 – vctl / KinD / MetalLB / Niginx deployment

A number of months back, I wrote an article which looked at how we now provide a Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) service in VMware Fusion 12. In a nutshell, this allows us to very quickly stand up a Kubernetes environment using the Nautilus Container Engine with a very lightweight virtual machine (CRX) based on VMware Photon OS. In this post, I wanted to extend the experience, and demonstrate how we can stand up a simple Nginx deployment. First, we will do a simple deployment.  Then we will extend it to use a Load Balancer service (leveraging MetalLB). This post will…

Deploying Harbor v2.1.0 – Step By Step

Over the thanksgiving break, I took the opportunity to look at the steps required to deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKGm) in an air-gapped or internet-restricted environment. The first step to achieving this was to deploy the Harbor Container Image Registry locally in my own environment. While I’ve written about Harbor quite a bit in the early days, I haven’t looked at it in earnest recently, so it was good to revisit it and see what changed. In this post, I’ll walk through the steps involved, and point you to few scripts that I developed to speed up the process. At…

A first look at the vctl utility in VMware Fusion

Last week I updated my version of VMware Fusion to 11.5.6. If you don’t know about VMware Fusion, it is a VMware product that gives Mac users the ability to run guest virtual machines. One of the new features that I noticed was the inclusion of a new vctl utility (IIRC, it became available first in v11.5.5.).  This is a command line utility for the Nautilus Container Engine which is now part of VMware Fusion. It allows you to work on OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers from your desktop. I decided to take a closer look, and do a few…

Integrating embedded vSphere with Kubernetes Harbor Registry with TKG (guest) clusters

A number of readers have hit me up with queries around how they can use the integrated Harbor image repository (that comes integrated with vSphere with Kubernetes) for applications that are deployed on their Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, sometimes referred to as guest clusters. Unfortunately, there is no defined workflow on how to achieve this. The reason for this is that there are a number of additional life-cycle management considerations that we need to take into account before we can fully integrate these components. This includes adding new TKG nodes to the image registry as a TKG cluster is scaled.…

Kubernetes on vSphere 101 – Ingress

As I was researching content for the 101 series, I came across the concept of an Ingress. As I hadn’t come across it before, I wanted to do a little more research on what it actually did. It seems that in some ways, they achieve the same function as a Load Balancer in so far as they provide a mean of allowing external traffic into your cluster. But they are significantly different in how they do this. If we take the Load Balancer service type first, then for every service that is exposed via a Load Balancer, a unique external…

Kubernetes on vSphere 101 – Services

This will be last article in the 101 series, as I think I have covered off most of the introductory storage related items at this point. One object that came up time and again during the series was services. While not specifically a storage item, it is a fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. In the 101 series, we came across a “headless” service with the Cassandra StatefulSet demo. This was where service type ClusterIP was set to None. When we started to look at ReadWriteMany volumes, we used NFS to demonstrate these volumes in action. In the first NFS…