Regular readers will have seen a number of articles on this site which use the tanzu command line to create and delete TKGm clusters. TKGm is the nomenclature that I am using to describe multi-cloud TKG clusters (also known as standalone TKG clusters) that can be deployed onto numerous different IaaS, including vSphere. In this post, I want to show you how to use the same tanzu CLI tools to deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster via the TKG service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu. I have always shown that to deploy TKG clusters on vSphere with Tanzu, you login to…
Now that VMware has recently released vSphere 7.0U3c, there have been a number of enhancements to vSphere with Tanzu and the TKG Service. Some of these enhancements have been described in recent posts, such as the new v1alpha2 Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster format, as well as new capabilities to the Namespace Service. In this post, I want to go back to basics and look at some changes to the vSphere with Tanzu installation and setup experience. One of the major enhancements is in the area of networking, with DHCP support added for both the Management networks and the Workload network(s). The…
Today I wanted to take a closer look at the new Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster YAML format (v1alpha2) which extends the configurability of TKG clusters that are deployed via the TKG Service (TKGS) in vSphere with Tanzu. We will look at this from two viewpoints. The first is to show you the differences when it comes to creating a new TKG cluster, as there are a number of different manifest settings now required with the v1alpha2 format. The second viewpoint is to look at how to upgrade the Tanzu Kubernetes Release (tkr) on an existing cluster which has been upgraded from…
Now that vSphere 7.0U3c is available, I thought it might be a good time to revisit some of the vSphere with Tanzu features that have appeared in recent editions. The first of these is the Namespace Service, which enables dev-ops personas to create their own Supervisor Namespaces through the command line via kubectl. We have extended this feature in vSphere 7.0U3c to allow dev-ops to add their own Kubernetes labels and annotations. Let’s take a look at how this works, and how the vSphere Administrator can put guardrails around the amount of vSphere resources this persona can consume when creating…
This week, I have been looking at the new features in TKG v1.4.1 for vSphere which dropped very recently. You can find the TKG v1.4.1 Release Notes here. Probably the most notable feature is that TKG v1.4.1 is now supported in Tanzu Mission Control, so you can now add this to your suite of Kubernetes clusters that are centrally managed from TMC. Note that a few things have changed around how to register a TKG management cluster with TMC which I will cover shortly. The other item that caught my attention was the fact that the Identity Management components that…
In this last episode of the series, we look at the final steps involved in building a TKG Management Cluster on vSphere from the UI. In this video, we will look at how to select an OS Image, where to download it from, and once installed, where they live on vSphere as templates. This OS Image is used to build the TKG control plane and worker nodes (virtual machines) in the management cluster. We will finish off with a discussion around where the completed TKG management cluster configuration file lives on your desktop, and what else it can be used…
In this penultimate video in the series of installing a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (Grid) management cluster onto vSphere using the UI, we will look at the optional Identity Management configuration. In particular, we will look at integration with a secure LDAP service (in this demo, Microsoft Active Directory). We will see how to use the “Verify LDAP Configuration” utility to ensure that the LDAPS Endpoint, Bind configuration, and User and Group Search Attributes are functioning as expected before deploying the TKG management cluster onto vSphere. This will result in the deployment of additional packages on the cluster, such as Pinniped…