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…
Some time back, I wrote a blog post about how to use the network policies available with the Antrea CNI (Container Network Interface). In that post we looked at how to create a simple network policy to prevent communication between pods in a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, based on pod selectors / labels. We stood up a simply web server and a standalone pod, and showed how the pod could access the web server when no network policies were in place. We then proceeded to create a network policy that only allowed pods to communicate to each other if the pod…
In this post, I am going to show how I set up my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid management cluster using a proxy configuration. I suspect this may be something many readers might want to try at some point, for various reasons. I will add a caveat to say that I have done the bare minimum to get this configuration to work, so you will probably want to spend far more time than I did on tweaking and tuning the proxy configuration. At the end of the day, the purpose of this exercise is to show how a TKG bootstrap virtual machine…
As we head into VMworld 2021 this week, there will be many announcements about new and updated VMware products and features. However, there is one that I want to bring to your attention. It is something that I have been directly involved in, in some small way, and that something is Tanzu Community Edition. Tanzu Community Edition (sometimes referred to as TCE), is a free, open source Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) distribution which has all of the same open source software found in our commercial editions of Tanzu. Personally, I find this to be a really cool announcement for a number…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time highlighting many of the new features of vSphere with Tanzu in earlier blog posts. In those posts, we saw how vSphere with Tanzu could be used to provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) guest clusters to provide a native, upstream-like, VMware supported Kubernetes. In this post, I want to delve into the guest cluster in more detail and examine the new, default Container Network Interface (CNI) called Antrea that is now shipping with the TKG guest cluster. Antrea provides networking and security services for a Kubernetes cluster. It is based on the Open vSwitch…
I’ve spent a lot of time recently on creating and building out vSphere with Tanzu environment, with the goal of deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster. I frequently used the kubectl-vsphere command to logout of the Supervisor namespace context and login to the Guest cluster context. This allowed me to start deploying stateful and stateful apps in my Tanzu Kubernetes Guest cluster. I thought no more about this step until a recent conversation with my colleague Frank Denneman. He queried whether or not Kubernetes developers would actually have vSphere privileges to do this. It was a great question which led…
In a previous video, we looked at the steps involved in enabling vSphere with Tanzu / Workload Management. That video concluded with the creation of a vSphere Namespace. In this video, we will demonstrate how to login to the namespace, how to create a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) ‘guest’ cluster via a simple manifest / YAML file, and then how to change contexts so that a developer can work in the context of the new TKG guest cluster. This video accompanies a more detailed write-up on deploying a TKG guest cluster in vSphere with Tanzu.