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Exploration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-vCenter Server templating using YTT

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The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.

While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment ? and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!

This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.

After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressions  🙂

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Packer reference for VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance

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I recently had a need to setup a container registry for a project that I was working on and Harbor was of course my default choice. Although Harbor is pretty easy to setup, I did not want to manually go through the installation each time I needed Harbor and I figured it was time to build my own Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA), just like I have shown in the past with these reference implementations here and here.

UPDATE (02/03/23) - VMware has productized and is now shipping an official VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA) as part of the latest Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (2.1) release.

For those interested, you can find the reference implementation for building a Harbor Virtual Appliance at https://github.com/lamw/harbor-appliance

When deploying the Harbor Appliance, you will find the basic OVF properties that I have encoded including networking, credentials, debugging and advanced settings. Hopefully should be pretty straight forward for anyone who has deployed an OVA before to vSphere.

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Automated Lab Deployment Script for vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB)

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After spending a few days playing with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) APIs, I am happy to share my latest automation lab deployment script for deploying vSphere with Tanzu using the new NSX ALB which was introduced with the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release.

Lab Deployment Automation

You can find the new automation script along with all the details at the following Github Repo: https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-with-tanzu-nsx-advanced-lb-automated-lab-deployment#enable-workload-management


In my environment, it took about ~32 minutes for the deployment to finish, but YMMV based on the performance of your underlying hardware.

Workload Management Automation

In addition to the automated lab deployment script above, I have also updated my community VMware.WorkloadManagement module to add support for enabling Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster using NSX ALB. This is introduced as a new function creatively called New-WorkloadManagement3. You use the Get-Help cmdlet to get a list of supported arguments or you can take a look at this example.