Many customers have data centres which have restricted access to the outside world, commonly referred to as air-gapped. This was well understood in the early design stages of Data Services Manager (DSM), which led to the creation of an air-gap deployment methodology. Therefore customers who could not avail of the automatic download mechanism for database templates and updates could manually populate their provider repository with manually downloaded images. However, customers who wish to deploy the current version of DSM (v2.0.3) today will also have to use the air-gap approach to add the database templates to their provider repository. This is…
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…
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.…