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)
