Some useful tips when deploying TKG in an air-gap environment

Recently I have been looking at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) in air-gapped or internet restricted environments. Interestingly, we offer different procedures for TKG v1.3 and TKG v1.4. In TKG v1.3, we pull the TKG images one at a time from the external VMware registry, and immediately push them up to an internal Harbor registry. In TKG v1.4, there is a different approach whereby all the images are first downloaded (in tar format) onto a workstation that has internet access. These images are then securely copied to the TKG jumpbox workstation, and from there, they are uploaded to the local…

Validating Kubernetes cluster conformance with Sonobuoy

Another product added to the VMware portfolio with the acquisition of Heptio is Sonobuoy. In a nutshell, Sonobuoy will validate the state of your Kubernetes cluster by running a suite of non-destructive tests against your cluster. As part of the end-to-end (e2e) tests that are run by Sonobuoy, there is a also a subset of conformance tests run as well. These include things like best practices and interoperability tests. This will ensure that your Kubernetes cluster (whether is an upstream version or a third-party packaged version) supports all of the necessary Kubernetes APIs. You can read more about conformance here.…