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VMware Tanzu

Deploy Harbor in an Air-Gapped environment for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

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When using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and the new TKG CLI, outbound internet connectivity is required as part of the initial setup on the machine running TKG CLI but also on the TKG Management Cluster which is automatically stood up as part of the deployment. For demo and testing purposes, this is usually not a problem but for anyone looking to run this in a Production or datacenter environment, direct internet access is generally not available.

TKG does support air-gapped environments today by requiring a private container registry that has been configured with all the required containers. Once your registry has been setup, you will also need to update the TKG YAML manifest files to specify your private registry as by default, it will point to registry.tkg.vmware.run. You can use any container registry that is supported with Kubernetes including the popular Harbor solution. One thing to note is that your private registry must have a proper signed SSL certificate, custom CA certificates or self-signed certificates are not officially supported today with TKG.

Since I recently had to set this up for a project I am working on, which I hope to talk about in a future blog post, I thought it would be useful to share the instructions on how to setup and configure Harbor to be used in-conjunction with TKG as well as any other solution that requires a container registry running in your own environment. In my deployment, I will be using Let's Encrypt for generating the required SSL certificate, but you can use any existing service for performing this operation. I will also be installing Harbor on Photon OS, but you can use any operating system of your choice that Harbor is supported on.


Pre-Requisites 

  • Access to a public DNS domain which you have ownership of (e.g. adding new records)
  • Access to your internal DNS server to add a custom DNS zone lookup entry (e.g. registry.<yourdomain>.com)

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How to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster with Antrea CNI 

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I have been working with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) quite a bit lately and using their new slick TKG CLI for deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) which can run in both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as your on-premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment. If you have vSphere 7 and the vSphere with Kubernetes capability, it also supports TKG deployments natively as part of that solution but you can also use TKG CLI to deploy TKC's.

Out of the box, TKG includes all the necessary software components to deploy a production grade, upstream and conformant Kubernetes distribution. For most customers, the "batteries included" type of offering is more than sufficient but for some customers who may wish to customize some of these components further when running the standalone distribution. One such example is swapping out the default Container Network Interface (CNI) which uses Calico for a different CNI with more capabilities.


As you may have guess from the title of this post, we will be replacing Calico with Antrea which is another open source CNI. In fact, Antrea was started by VMware last year and uses Open vSwitch (OVS) to provide network and security capabilities to Kubernetes. You can read more about Project Antrea here and more details about its architecture can be found here.

Disclaimer: This is currently not officially supported by VMware. I do know the TKG team is looking at Antrea support in the future.

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Automated vSphere 7 and vSphere with Kubernetes Lab Deployment Script

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I know many of you have been asking me about my vSphere with Kubernetes automation script which I had been sharing snippets of on Twitter. For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work making the required changes between the vSphere 7 Beta and GA workflows, some additional testing and of course documentation. Hopefully the wait was worth it (I think it is) and if you enjoy the script or have benefited, please consider adding 🌟to the Github repo to show your support! Thanks and enjoy

The Github repository:

Before getting started, please carefully read through the requirements section along with the complete sample end-to-end execution if you are new to vSphere with Kubernetes. You will need to have a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 license before you can get started and specifically an NSX-T Advance license which is one of the required parameters within the script. If you do not have access to a VCF 4 license, I strongly recommend taking part in the recent VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy effort which I had started to easily get access to the latest VMware releases along with a nice 15% discount!

The script supports deploying both a standard vSphere 7 environment with just VCSA, ESXi and vSAN as well as the complete solution which includes NSX-T to support vSphere with Kubernetes. For more details, please refer to the FAQ.

New vCenter events for vSphere 7, VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10 and vSphere with Kubernetes

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Last year I published a Github repo which lists all the vCenter Server Events for a default installation for both vSphere 6.7 Update 3 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.9. Since every vSphere environment is going to be unique with various 2nd and 3rd party solutions, I have also included a small PowerCLI script in the blog that you can use to generate the list of events for your own deployment.

With the release of vSphere 7 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10, I thought it was time to update the repo to see what's new which can be useful in a number of scenarios including using these events with the popular vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling.

One thing worth pointing out with the introduction of vSphere with Kubernetes in vSphere 7, is there are also specific vCenter events, a total of 23 that are available and I am sure more will come in the future. Below is a quick summary which is also included in the Github repo.

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Sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere & VMware Cloud on AWS

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Last week, VMware had its huge launch which included VMware Cloud Foundation 4, vSphere 7, vSAN 7 and the brand new VMware Tanzu Portfolio that will help organizations build, run and manage modern applications for their business. Although we still have a couple of more months before general availability, the level of excitement for these upcoming releases was pretty amazing to see on social media, especially for the highly anticipated Kubernetes with vSphere capability, formally known as Project Pacific.

UPDATE (04/10/20) - TKG 1.0 has officially GA'ed, you can now deploy TKG Clusters using the new TKG CLI/UI as demonstrated in this blog post.

When vSphere 7 is available, Kubernetes with vSphere is just one way in which customers will be able to deploy upstream and conformant Open Source Kubernetes also referred to as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). For customers that require a solution today or for those that may not able to upgrade to vSphere 7 immediately, VMware has another option called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus for vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS which was also announced last week but albeit not many folks took notice.


There are few things worth mentioning about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus:

  1. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus is a new offering that is comprised of the core TKG software and it includes support from VMware's Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), which is a team made up of Kubernetes Architects that can help customers design and architect their Cloud Native Applications running on the VMware Tanzu Platform
  2. For customers that do not require CRE support and just want standard VMware GSS Support, then you can simply use Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which includes VMware Support and Subscription (SnS)
  3. The core TKG software which Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus includes can deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (upstream K8s running in VMs). Customers can already do this right now by using Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically the Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) which provides lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster running on any valid vSphere endpoint including VMware Cloud on AWS. The latest CAPV v1alpha3 release also introduces a new workflow that reduces the number of steps compared to v1alpha2 which is now deprecated

For customers that want to further customize how Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster are deployed and configured including tools that they are already using, CAPV will be the most flexible option. Having gone through the CAPV workflows myself, I think it can still be daunting if you are new to this space, not to mention the different CLI tools that you will have to learn to have a successful deployment. Luckily, the VMware TKG team has also been thinking about the overall user experience and how they can build on top of CAPV to provide a much more simpler and more intuitive interface for customers that is just looking for a turnkey option.

Here is a sneak peek (Technical Preview) of the upcoming Tanzu Kubernetes Grid CLI or TKG CLI for short which will make deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on ANY vSphere endpoint incredibly EASY!

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