Getting started with the TKGm (multi-cloud) Command Line (Videos)

In this post, I have two short videos demonstrating how to (1) deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud (TKGm) management cluster using the “tkg” command line tool, and then once the TKG management cluster has been deployed, I show how to (2) very simply deploy a subsequent TKG workload cluster using the same “tkg” command. Note that at I have updated this post to use the TKGm acronym, as this is now how we are marketing this particular product. Previously, the term standalone was used. If you wish to know more detail, check out my full post on how to…

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud (TKGm) from the tkg Command Line Interface

After spending quite a bit of time looking at vSphere with Kubernetes, and how one could deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) “guest” cluster in a namespace with a simple manifest file, I thought it was time to look at other ways in which customers could deploy TKG clusters on top of vSphere infrastructure. In other words, deploy TKG without vSphere with Kubernetes, or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) for that matter.  This post will look at TKG multi-cloud (TKGm) version 1.1.2 and in particular the tkg command line tool to first deploy a TKG management cluster, and once that is…

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.…

vSphere CSI driver versions and capabilities

The vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is what enables Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere to provision persistent volumes on vSphere storage. This applies to both native Kubernetes clusters, and vSphere with Kubernetes. With the release of vSphere 7.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly Project Pacific) there are now a number of different flavors of the vSphere CSI driver available. [Update] Before going any further, it is worth highlighting the differences between what we term native Kubernetes and vSphere with Kubernetes. Native Kubernetes has many flavors, such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) formerly known…

Understanding the Tanzu portfolio (and the new names for VMware modern app products)

The new Tanzu portfolio has a plethora of new (and not so new) Kubernetes products that we are all getting used to. There are also some new names that we are using for existing VMware products. I decided to dedicate some time to figuring it all, and documenting it here for future posterity as I know others are also finding the new branding a challenge. Note that I’m not including the new suite of products that were added to the Tanzu portfolio when VMware acquired Pivotal. This post is focusing purely on the Kubernetes related products. Enterprise PKS is now…

Enabling Pods to pull from external image repositories in vSphere with Kubernetes

Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a considerable amount of time recently talking about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific. Over the past month or so, we have seen how to deploy a VCF 4.0 Management Domain. We also looked at how to create a VCF 4.0 VI Workload Domain, at the same time deploying an NSX-T 3.0 Edge Cluster to the Workload Domain which is now automated in VCF 4.0. With this all configured, we then went through the steps of deploying vSphere with Kubernetes onto this…

Deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) cluster in vSphere with Kubernetes (Video)

This video will show the steps involved in deploying a fully functional Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster (TKG) via vSphere with Kubernetes. We will see how to build and sync a content library for the TKG control plane and worker node images. We will walk through the creation of a new namespace, and review the manifest file used for the creation of the cluster. Once deployed, we will switch contexts from the namespace used to build the cluster and place ourselves in the context of the new TKG cluster. From there, we will run some kubectl commands to query the cluster.…