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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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Frequently asked scenarios about Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+

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This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! ?

While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:

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vSphere Pods using VDS based Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu?

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vSphere with Tanzu has received an exciting update with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 1, which removes the restriction for requiring NSX-based networking to deploy Supervisor Services. This is really cool because customers with only a VDS based Supervisor can now also get the benefits of the various Supervisor Services that vSphere with Tanzu supports!


For those not aware, Supervisor Services are deployed as vSphere Pods, which is a super tiny VM that boots up a Photon OS kernel and is configured with just enough resources to run one or more Linux containers. In earlier releases of vSphere with Tanzu, vSphere Pods required an NSX based Supervisor, but with this restriction removed in vSphere 8.0 Update 1, it seems like deploying vSphere Pods should also be possible with just a VDS based Supervisor? ?

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