Customers can create a Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) content library by either subscribing to VMware's online repository or by creating a local content library and manually importing the images, which can be useful for air-gapped or non-internet accessible environments.
If you automatically subscribe to VMware's online repository, the TKR images (OVF) will automatically be downloaded and will be stored with a default item name that looks like the following:
However, when creating a local content library, customers must manually import the OVF images after downloading them from VMware's online repository (https://wp-content.vmware.com/v2/latest/). During the OVF import wizard, you will notice that each TKR has the same default name called "photon-ova" and you will most likely rename it to something more useful.
Prior to vSphere 8, you could use any name and vSphere with Tanzu would not care as there is metadata associated within each TKR image that provides version that is needed when creating a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC).
I was attempting to deploy a TKC using a new TKR version, which I needed to download and import into my vSphere 8 environment and that is where I ran into a strange error:
