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 with Kubernetes on VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture

Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 over 1 month ago, I have been asked one question repeatedly – when can I run vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly known as Project Pacific) on a VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture? In other words, when can I deploy vSphere with Kubernetes on the Management Domain rather than building a separate VI Workload Domain to run it. The main reason for this request is because this reduces the number of ESXi hosts required to run vSphere with Kubernetes from 7 down to 4. So I am delighted to announce that we now have…

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…

Building a TKG Cluster in vSphere with Kubernetes

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…