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VMware Tanzu

Custom Virtual Machine Class Types with vSphere with Tanzu

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When you deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using the integrated TKG Service in vSphere with Tanzu, you can specify a Virtual Machine Class Type which determines the amount of CPU and Memory resources that are allocated for both the Control Plane and/or Worker Node VMs for your TKG Cluster.

Here is a sample YAML specification that uses the best-effort-xsmall VM class type for both Control Plane and Worker Node, but you can certainly override and choose different classes based on your requirements.

Today, the are a total of 16 VM Class types that you can select from, however these are not customizable which is something that has been coming up more recently. The vSphere with Tanzu team is aware of this request and is working on a solution that not only makes customizing CPU and Memory easier but also supporting storage customization. As you can see from the table below, 16GB is only supported configuration today.


In the mean time, if you need a supported path for customizing your TKG Guest Clusters, one option is to use the TKG Standalone / MultiCloud CLI, which can be used with a vSphere with Tanzu Cluster. You will need to deploy an additional TKG Management Cluster (basically a few VMs), but once you have that, you can override CPU, Memory and Storage of both the Control Plane and Worker Nodes using the following environment variables:

  • VSPHERE_WORKER_NUM_CPUS
  • VSPHERE_WORKER_MEM_MIB
  • VSPHERE_WORKER_DISK_GIB
  • VSPHERE_CONTROL_PLANE_NUM_CPUS
  • VSPHERE_CONTROL_PLANE_MEM_MIB
  • VSPHERE_CONTROL_PLANE_DISK_GIB

If you are interested, the easiest way to get started is by using my TKG Demo Appliance Fling which was just recently updated to the latest TKG 1.2 release which has support for K8s v1.19 which is currently not available on vSphere with Tanzu.

Now, you might ask, would it be possible to create your own custom VM class types using vSphere with Tanzu? Well .... keep reading to find out 🙂

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. These custom changes can potentially impact upgrades or automatically be reverted upon the next update or upgrade. You have been warned.

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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.0

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Happy to share that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling has been updated to support the latest TKG 1.2.0 release which just came out a couple of weeks ago. The TKG Workshop Guide has been updated to reflect all new TKG 1.2 changes along with an updated vSphere Content Library containing all the OVA required to get started. As mentioned in the workshop guide, you can use either a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (1-Node) or a vSphere 6.7 Update 3/vSphere 7.0+ environment.

The most notable change with this version is actually within TKG itself which now uses kube-vip to replace the functionality that the HAProxy VM used to provide. What this means when deploying either a TKG Management or Workload Cluster is that you will need to specify an IP Address which will be used for the Virtual IP endpoint of the K8s Cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.10


Using the TKG Demo Appliance, you can deploy both v1.19.1 and v1.18.8 K8s Clusters. To exercise a TKG Cluster upgrade workflow, you just have to run these three simple commands:

export VSPHERE_TEMPLATE=photon-3-kube-v1.18.8_vmware.1
tkg create cluster tkg-cluster-01 --plan=dev --kubernetes-version=v1.18.8+vmware.1 --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.11
tkg upgrade cluster tkg-cluster-01


There has been a lot of demand for TKG on VMware Cloud on AWS, so that is where I have spent the bulk of my testing not to mention where it was originally developed. You can also deploy the TKG Demo Appliance in an on-premises vSphere environment running 6.7 Update 3 or newer.

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Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

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As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

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Customizing Kubernetes cluster template (Dev/Prod) plans in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.2

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With previous releases of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), if you needed to apply special OS customizations that were applied to the deployed Control Plane and Worker Node VMs, such as injecting commands to handle network proxy or dealing with insecure container registry, your only option was to hand edit the default TKG Dev/Prod YAML templates. Not only was this error prone but because the templates can change from each release, it was difficult to manage and test until you attempted a deployment.

One of the newest features with the release of TKG 1.2 is official support for customizing the Kubernetes (K8s) Cluster Templates Plans using YTT (YAML Templating Tooling) which allows users to provide custom data that can then be patched/overlay to an existing YAML file. YTT itself is part of a larger toolset for building, creating and configuring deployments for K8s called Carvel. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) that YTT uses was not exactly intuitive but since the official TKG documentation had an example to start with, I was able to mostly figure my way through along with some tips from the #carvel Slack channel.

So what was I trying to do? I was working on updating my TKG Demo Appliance Fling to the latest 1.2 release and part of the setup required adding an entry to /etc/hosts file on all TKG VMs that are deployed. Instead of directly messing with the YAML templates, there is now a new "overlay" YAML file in ~/.tkg/providers/infrastructure-vsphere/ytt/vsphere-overlay.yaml which can be used to make such changes.

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Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script

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After sharing a sneak peak of my updated vSphere with Tanzu Automated Lab Deployment script on Twitter, I have been receiving non-stop requests on when the script will be available. It took a bit longer to finish off the documentation, creating the script was actually the easy part 😛

In any case, I am happy to finally share the automated script for deploying the new vSphere with Tanzu "Basic" which is included as part of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 is now available! You can find full details at the following Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-basic-automated-lab-deployment

In addition to the deployment instructions on the Github repo, I have also included a sample walkthrough which includes both deploying the vSphere with Tanzu environment as well as enabling Workload Management on the vSphere Cluster, which is not part of the automated deployment script.

I will also be updating my existing Workload Management PowerCLI Module to incorporate the new requirements for automating the enablement of Workload Management for a vSphere with Tanzu Basic Cluster. Together with this script, you will now have the ability to deploy vSphere with Tanzu end-to-end in under 1hr time!

More details will be shared in a later blog post and I hope folks enjoy the script, it was a ton of work!

How to SSH to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu?

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For troubleshooting your vSphere with Tanzu environment, you may have a need to SSH to the Control Plane of your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster. This was something I had to do to verify some basic network connectivity. At a high level, we need to login to our Supervisor Cluster and retrieve the SSH secret to our TKG Cluster and since this question recently came up, below are the instructions.


UPDATE (10/10/20) - It looks like it is also possible to retrieve the TKG Cluster credentials without needing SSH directly to the Supervisor Control Plane VM, see Option 1 for the alternate solution.

Option 1:

Step 1 - Login to the Supervisor Control Plane using the following command:

kubectl vsphere login --server=172.17.31.129 -u *protected email* --insecure-skip-tls-verify

Step 2 - Next, we need to retrieve the SSH password secret for our TKG Cluster and perform a base64 decode to retrieve the plain text value. You will need two pieces of information and then substitute that into the command below

  • The name of your vSphere Namespace which was created in your vSphere with Tanzu environment, in my example it is called primp-industries
  • The name of your TKG Cluster, in my example it is called william-tkc-01 and the secret name will be [tkg-cluster-name]-ssh-password as shown in the example below

kubectl -n primp-industries get secrets william-tkc-01-ssh-password -o jsonpath={.data.ssh-passwordkey} | base64 -d

Step 3 - Finally, you can now SSH to TKG Cluster from a system which has network connectivity, this can be from the Supervisor Cluster Control Plane VM or another system. The SSH username for the TKG Cluster is vmware-system-user and use the credentials that was provided from the previous screen.

Option 2:

Step 1 - SSH to the VCSA and then run the following script to retrieve the Supervisor Cluster Control Plane VM credentials:

/usr/lib/vmware-wcp/decryptK8Pwd.py

Step 2 - SSH to the IP Address using root username and the password provided from the previous command

Step 3- Next, we need to retrieve the SSH password secret for our TKG Cluster and perform a base64 decode to retrieve the plain text value. You will need two pieces of information and then substitute that into the command below

  • The name of your vSphere Namespace which was created in your vSphere with Tanzu environment, in my example it is called primp-industries
  • The name of your TKG Cluster, in my example it is called william-tkc-01 and the secret name will be [tkg-cluster-name]-ssh-password as shown in the example below

kubectl -n primp-industries get secrets william-tkc-01-ssh-password -o jsonpath={.data.ssh-passwordkey} | base64 -d

Step 4 - Finally, you can now SSH to TKG Cluster from a system which has network connectivity, this can be from the Supervisor Cluster Control Plane VM or another system. The SSH username for the TKG Cluster is vmware-system-user and use the credentials that was provided from the previous screen.