In this final installment of my “vSphere with Tanzu” posts, we are going to look at how to create our very first Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) guest cluster. In previous posts, we have compared vSphere with Tanzu to VCF with Tanzu, and covered the prerequisites. Then we looked at the steps involved in deploying the HA-Proxy to provide a load balancer service to vSphere with Tanzu. In my most recent post, we looked at the steps involved in enabling workload management. Now that all of that is in place, we are finally able to go ahead and deploy a TKG cluster,…
In this post, I have two short videos demonstrating how to (1) deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud (TKGm) management cluster using the “tkg” command line tool, and then once the TKG management cluster has been deployed, I show how to (2) very simply deploy a subsequent TKG workload cluster using the same “tkg” command. Note that at I have updated this post to use the TKGm acronym, as this is now how we are marketing this particular product. Previously, the term standalone was used. If you wish to know more detail, check out my full post on how to…
After spending quite a bit of time looking at vSphere with Kubernetes, and how one could deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) “guest” cluster in a namespace with a simple manifest file, I thought it was time to look at other ways in which customers could deploy TKG clusters on top of vSphere infrastructure. In other words, deploy TKG without vSphere with Kubernetes, or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) for that matter. This post will look at TKG multi-cloud (TKGm) version 1.1.2 and in particular the tkg command line tool to first deploy a TKG management cluster, and once that is…
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.…
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…
The vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is what enables Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere to provision persistent volumes on vSphere storage. This applies to both native Kubernetes clusters, and vSphere with Kubernetes. With the release of vSphere 7.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly Project Pacific) there are now a number of different flavors of the vSphere CSI driver available. [Update] Before going any further, it is worth highlighting the differences between what we term native Kubernetes and vSphere with Kubernetes. Native Kubernetes has many flavors, such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) formerly known…
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…