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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance for VMC and vSphere

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As some of you can probably tell from my recent Twitter updates and blog posts (here and here) that I have been spending some time lately with both vSphere with Kubernetes and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). Like many of you in the community, I am still pretty new to Kubernetes (K8s) and I am still learning about what it has to offer both from an infrastructure standpoint but more importantly how it can be used to deliver new and modern applications. I am also very lucky to be part of the the VMware Event Broker Appliance Open Source Fling project which builds and runs on top K8s and this project has allowed me to really get hands on which is how I learn best.

A couple of months back I was asked to put together a workshop to demonstrate how to deploy TKG Clusters running on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and while developing the workshop, I thought it would be really cool if I could make it even easier for anyone that is brand new to K8s to quickly get started with TKG. I wanted to have a solution that can literally be dropped into any supported vSphere-based environment with basic networking to go from Zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes!

Enter the Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Fling

A Virtual Appliance that pre-bundles all required dependencies to help customers in learning and deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters running on either VMware Cloud on AWS and/or vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment for Proof of Concept, Demo and Dev/Test purposes. This appliance will enable you to quickly go from zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes with just an SSH client and a web browser!


In addition to the appliance, I have also put together a step by step workshop-style guide which not only walks you through in deploying your first TKG Cluster but also provide some example demos and references which you can explore further. Below are some of the highlights of the Demo Appliance for TKG:

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Configure non-secure Harbor registry with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

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In an earlier blog post, I shared the steps to to configure Harbor with a proper signed SSL certificate that would serve as  private container registry for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) CLI running in an air-gapped environment.

Although Harbor can easily be configured to support custom CA signed certificate, self-sign certificate and even just using HTTP, there are several additional steps and dependencies that is required if you wish to use a non-secure container registry with TKG CLI. This definitely was a bunch of trial/error and hopefully this can be made easier in the future to easily enable non-secure registry support with TKG CLI out of the box for development and testing purpose.

I also want to give a huge thanks to Jun Wang from our Modern Application Business Unit (MAPU), he was instrumental in helping me out and ultimately his tip on updating the containerd configuration was the last piece to the puzzle so that the K8s images deployed would use our insecure Harbor registry for pulling container images.

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Deploying a minimal vSphere with Kubernetes environment

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A very useful property of automation is the ability to experiment. After creating my vSphere 7 with Kubernetes Automation Lab Deployment Script, I wanted to see what was the minimal footprint in terms of the physical resources but also the underlying components that would be required to allow me to still a fully functional vSphere with Kubernetes environment.

Before diving in, let me give you the usual disclaimer 😉

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and you can potentially run into issues if you deviate from the official requirements which the default deployment script adheres to out of the box.

In terms of the physical resources, you will need a system that can provision up to 8 vCPU (this can be further reduced, see Additional Resource Reduction section below), 92GB memory and 1TB of storage (thin provisioned).


which translates to following configuration within the script:

  • 1 x Nested ESXi VM with 4 vCPU and 36GB memory
  • 1 x VCSA with 2 vCPU and 12GB memory
  • 1 x NSX-T Unified Appliance with 4 vCPU and 12GB memory
  • 1 x NSX-T Edge with 8 vCPU and 12GB memory

Note: You can probably reduce memory footprint of the ESXi VM further depending on your usage and the VCSA is using the default values for "Tiny", so you can probably trim the memory down a bit more.

Another benefit to this solution is by reducing the number of ESXi VMs required, it also speeds up the deployment and in just 35 minutes, you can have the complete infrastructure fully stood up and configured to try out vSphere with Kubernetes!


The other trick that I leveraged to reduce the amount of resources is by changing the default number of Supervisor Control Plane VMs required for enabling vSphere with Kubernetes. By default, three of these VMs are deployed as part of setting up the Supervisor Cluster, however I found a way to tell the Workload Control Plane (WCP) to only deploy two 🙂


This minimal deployment of vSphere with Kubernetes has already been incorporated into my vSphere with Kubernetes deployment script, but it does require altering several specific settings. You can find the instructions below.

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