In this post, I am going to outline the steps involved to successfully deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) management cluster and workload clusters in an internet restricted environment. This is often referred to as an air-gapped environment. Note that for part of this exercise, a virtual machine will need to be connected to the internet in order to pull down the images requires for TKG. Once these have been downloaded and pushed up to our local Harbor container image registry, the internet connection can be removed and we will work in a completely air-gapped environment. Note that TKG here…
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 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.…
This short video will demonstrate how to deploy the embedded Harbor Image Registry in vSphere with Kubernetes. It will highlight the different PodVMs used for Harbor, as well as the Persistent Volumes required by some of the PodVMs. The demo will look at the integration between namespaces created in vSphere with Kubernetes and the Harbor projects. I will also show how to download the CA certificate to a client to enable remote access to Harbor. Finally, I will show how to tag and push some images up to the image registry.
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…
This short video will show you some of the initial steps that one might take once vSphere with Kubernetes has been successfully deployed via VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 and SDDC Manager. And FYI, as I know a number of reader have been asking this question, VCF 4.0 is now officially GA. In this short video, I will introduce you to the namespace concept in vSphere with Kubernetes as a way of allocating vSphere resources between multiple tenants. As well, we will see how to enable and use Harbor as a Container Image Registry. Finally we will deploy a StatefulSet…
Now that we have our vSphere with Kubernetes deployed, we take the next logical step in this post and deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) guest cluster. [Update] Whilst guest cluster isn’t an official name for the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, I’ll use it in this post to differentiate it from the Supervisor cluster deployed with vSphere with Kubernetes. TKG is a full CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution. It is deployed as a set of virtual machines, in accordance with a TanzuKubernetesCluster manifest which we will look at later. The OS and K8s distribution is also specified in the manifest. There may…