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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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Configure NSX-T Edge to run on AMD Ryzen CPU

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The vast majority of VMware Homelabs is still Intel-based today but I have been seeing a slow rise of AMD-based kits being adopted, especially with AMD's desktop line of CPUs known as Ryzen. One of the considerations on whether you could use an AMD processor was whether you were planning to deploy NSX-T and in earlier releases, only Intel was supported as the NSX-T Edge required support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and this was only supported with Intel-based processors.

With the latest NSX-T 3.0 release, AMD-based processors are now supported and per the release notes, the following CPUs can be used:

  • AMD EPYC 7xx1 Series (Naples)
  • AMD EPYC 3000 Embedded Family and newer
  • AMD EPYC 7xx2 Series (Rome)

You will notice that only AMD's server line of CPUs known as EPYC are currently supported, which makes sense for running Production workloads. If you attempt to deploy an NSX-T Edge Node running on a non-EPYC platform, you will get an error message stating the CPU is not supported and I figured this was probably due to the lack of DPDK support in the consumer CPUs.

Yesterday, in our internal "Homelab" Slack channel, I came across an interesting tidbit from Andrea Spagnolo, a Sr. Field Engineer in our Cloud Native Business Unit who shared a pretty neat trick on how to get latest NSX-T 3.0 release to work with a Ryzen-based CPU.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. The behaviors described here can change in the future

First off, I want to thank Andrea for sharing but also credit to Beniamino Guarnaschelli and his blog post here which actually gave Andrea the idea to take a closer look as he was trying to get this setup in his own personal homelab.

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Troubleshooting tips for configuring vSphere with Kubernetes

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With more and more folks trying out the new vSphere with Kubernetes capability, I have seen an uptick in questions both internally and externally around the initial setup of the infrastructure required for vSphere with Kubernetes but also during the configuration of a vSphere Cluster for Workload Management.

One of the most common question is why are there no vSphere Clusters listed or why a specific vSphere Cluster is showing up as Incompatible? There are a number of reasons that this can occur including vCenter Server not being able to communicate with NSX-T Manager to retrieve the list of NSX pre-checks which would cause the list to either be empty or listed as incompatible. Not having proper time sync between vCenter Server and NSX-T which can also manifest in a similar behavior among other infrastructure issues.


Having ran into some of these issues myself when developing my automation script, I figure it might be useful to share some of the troubleshooting tips I have used when trying to figure out what is going on whether that is during the initial setup or actually deploying workloads using vSphere with Kubernetes.

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