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How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?

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This weekend I spent some time installing Knative, which is an open source framework that is built on top of Kubernetes. Knative is actually made up of two core components, serving and eventing. This quote from Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile really sums up Knative quite nicely:

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability.

There are a number of tutorials online for setting up Knative, most of which using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) for easy local development. Since I have been spending quite a bit of time lately with both our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Multi-Cloud solution, which both support deploying conformant and production grade Kubernetes (K8s) Clusters called a TKG Guest Cluster, I figure I might as well learn how to install Knative using these infrastructures.

The instructions below will be focus on deploying the Knative serving components. Once you have that setup, it is easy to deploy the eventing components which you can follow the official Knative documentation.

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Why am I seeing HTTP communication status 404 error when configuring vSphere with Tanzu & how to fix?

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One thing I love about the VMware Community is the constant sharing of knowledge and information on a regular basis. I always enjoy discovering new tricks and tidbits from the community, especially as it helps me refine my own knowledge and understanding of a given technology or solution.

My good buddy Ariel Sanchez cc'ed me on Twitter yesterday referencing a blog post by Paul Wilk about an issue he was observing in his Nested ESXi environment when configuring vSphere with Tanzu.

This was in regards to the dreaded 404 message displayed in the vSphere UI:

HTTP communication could not be completed with status 404


which is actually not unique to a Nested environment. In fact, this cryptic error message was observed even in the first release of vSphere with Tanzu which used to be called vSphere with Kubernetes with the release of vSphere 7.0 release.

Although Paul's conclusion on why his fixed work was not exactly correct, it was the fix itself that I was actually most interested in. Even with the initial vSphere 7.0 release, I had assumed this was just a cosmetic vCenter Server error message. It was not ideal, but like many other customers, I just ignored it as the enablement of Workload Management was still successful.

What helped me connect the dots was the fact that Paul solved the problem by disabling the ESXi firewall, which meant this was actually an ESXi issue. Given this was related to the OVF deployment, I immediately knew what this was actually referring to and is related to an earlier blog post I had shared about a new feature that would allow ESXi to "pull" remote OVF/OVA files from a HTTP(s) endpoint. In this case, it was not OVFTool driving the deployment but rather vCenter Server and the Content Library service, which is also responsible for OVF/OVA deployments.

It turns out that as part of deploying the Supervisor VMs, instead of using the typical "push" method for uploading an OVA, vCenter is instructing the ESXi host to "pull" the OVA files remotely which are actually hosted on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) itself. What ends up happening is that because ESXi does not have the correct port in which the OVA is hosted on the VCSA, the "pull" method fails and it automatically falls back to the old "push" method. This is why you see the error message and then progress is immediately progressing.

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Automating kubectl-vsphere login for vSphere with Tanzu

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Before you can start deploying workloads to your vSphere with Tanzu Cluster, you need to first download the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl and then use that to login to your Supervisor Cluster which will generate a Kubernetes (K8s) context file that is stored in .kube/config

Here is an example of using the vSphere Plugin for Kubectl:

./kubectl-vsphere login --server=10.10.0.64 -u *protected email* --insecure-skip-tls-verify


For interactive sessions this is fine and upon successfully entering your password when prompted, you can switch to the correct K8s context to begin your workload deployment. For folks interested in automation, the one downside today is that the plugin does not provide a way to specify your password using either a command-line argument or reading from a configuration file.

I have actually seen this topic come up a few times both internally and externally for those wanting to automate the end to end deployment of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster and have gotten stuck on trying to figure a way around having to perform this required manual step.

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