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Building custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) for vSphere with Tanzu

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Right before going on PTO, I caught this really interesting tweet from my buddy Robert Guske that we now support building your own custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR), the Kubernetes software distributions that is signed and supported by VMware, which is typically provided by VMware through the online TKR Content Library.

While there are already a number of existing customizations that can be applied when deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes Workload Cluster (TKC), there may still be certain VM configurations that you would like to add, which is simply not possible today. In some of the customer requests, it can be as simple as changing the default size of the primary disk for a TKR, which is statically configured today as 20GB.

With this and many other use cases, it is nice to see that we now finally provide customers with a supported method to build their own custom TKR that might include additional customizations that is required by their organization for use with vSphere with Tanzu.

I recently got a chance to play with the new vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Image Builder tool, which is also an open source project from VMware and leverages the existing Kubernetes Image Builder, which I have also used before (see this blog post HERE for more details). While getting started, it took me a few tries but I eventually got it working after speaking with the Developers as I ran into a few issues.

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vSphere UI behavior change for VM Disk I/O Shares & Limits in vSphere 8.x

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If you use the vSphere UI to configure individual virtual disk I/O shares or limits for a Virtual Machine, it looks like this functionality has been removed in vSphere 8.x in favor of using VM Storage Policies, which has been around for almost a decade now.

Prior to vSphere 8.x, you could configure both disk shares and limits on an individual VMDK as shown in this screenshot below for a vSphere 7.x environment:


While this capability can be useful, it does come with some operational overhead of having to configure each and every virtual disk that has such a requirement and can certainly be error prone. Fortunately, this problem of defining various storage requirements and attributes for a VM and its virtual disks has already been solved with Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and the use of VM Storage Policies.

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Improved VM Storage Policy (Profile-driven storage) privileges in vSphere 8.x

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A couple of weeks ago I had noticed a few internal folks were asking about missing Profile-driven storage privileges in vSphere 8.x when referring to 2nd party VMware documentation asking for two privileges called "Profile-driven storage update" and "Profile-driven storage view" which no longer exists in vSphere 8.x when compared to the vSphere 7.x documentation.

At first, I thought this was purely a rename issue as the underlying feature of these privileges has always been known as VM Storage Policies, which is even used in the vSphere 7.x UI and has been around for quite some time. It looks like in earlier releases, the vSphere UI label for the privilege was still using the older name.

Here is a a screenshot of a vSphere 7.x environment where you can see the original two privilege names:


Here is a a screenshot of a vSphere 8.x environment, which now actually lists seven privileges, which has lead to some additional confusion.


Furthermore, it looks like these additional VM Storage Policy privileges have also not been updated in the vSphere 8.x documentation, which is currently a known issue and only references the renamed privileges.

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