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Introducing VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) - Tanzu Kubernetes for everyone!

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A very exciting new project was just announced at the DevOps Loop Conference called Tanzu Community Edition or TCE for short.

What is TCE and why should you care?

Today, it can be challenging for end users (administrators, architects, developers, platform operators, etc.) to get first hand experience with VMware's Tanzu portfolio. Some of the challenges can include downloading the software, licensing the software and having the required resources to run the software.

TCE aims to provide a frictionless experience for anyone that wants to get hands with an enterprise grade Kubernetes platform, that is fully featured with our Tanzu commercial offerings. TCE is easy to use, freely available for anyone to download and use for learning, testing, development and pre-production purposes.

In addition, TCE also includes newer features that are not found in the Tanzu commercial offering (yet) and early experimental features that the community will be the first to try out! As features further develop and mature based on feedback from the community, they will eventually graduate into our commercial offerings.
Not only does TCE provide access to the same commercial offering of our Kubernetes runtime called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), but it also includes additional packages that can be optionally installed that can help with building, managing, deploying and running modern applications and services.

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Quick Tip - Setting up Kubernetes using Containerd on Photon OS

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As part of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project, I was recently evaluating a newer version of Kubernetes (v1.21.3) and also switching the container runtime from Docker to Containerd. I figured this probably should not be that difficult, especially since we are already use Containerd within Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which is our commercial Kubernetes (k8s) offering and that base OS is VMware Photon OS. How hard could this be, right!? (famous last words) ?

We use kubeadm to setup K8s and read in a very basic configuration file and after following the official K8s instructions for prepping the environment to use containerd, I was surprised when I ran into the following error:

Unfortunately, an error has occurred:
timed out waiting for the condition

This error is likely caused by:
- The kubelet is not running
- The kubelet is unhealthy due to a misconfiguration of the node in some way (required cgroups disabled)

If you are on a systemd-powered system, you can try to troubleshoot the error with the following commands:
- 'systemctl status kubelet'
- 'journalctl -xeu kubelet'

Additionally, a control plane component may have crashed or exited when started by the container runtime.
To troubleshoot, list all containers using your preferred container runtimes CLI.

Here is one example how you may list all Kubernetes containers running in cri-o/containerd using crictl:
- 'crictl --runtime-endpoint /run/containerd/containerd.sock ps -a | grep kube | grep -v pause'
Once you have found the failing container, you can inspect its logs with:
- 'crictl --runtime-endpoint /run/containerd/containerd.sock logs CONTAINERID'

error execution phase wait-control-plane: couldn't initialize a Kubernetes cluster
To see the stack trace of this error execute with --v=5 or higher

Unfortunately, this lead me down a huge rat hole of troubleshooting and trying various configurations and suggestions from the Internet. Ultimately, none of the suggested solutions solved my problem. After exhausting all my options and spending more time that I would like to admit, I decided to ask in the Kubernetes Slack community to see if anyone might have an idea. There were not any specific suggestions that helped me understand the issue further but there was a question about how Containerd came to be on the system and that gave me one more thing to try.

Both Photon OS 3.0 and 4.0 ships with Containerd and after installing the desired kubeadm, kubectl and kubelet, I had wrongfully assumed that the version of Containerd would simply work.

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Quick Tip - Disable vSphere with Tanzu prompt during TKG Management Cluster deployment

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When you attempt to deploy a new Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Management Cluster to a vSphere 7.0 environment, you may have noticed a message stating that you may want to enable the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGs) alternatively.


Running TKG and TKGs on vSphere 7.0 is fully supported and depending on your use case, you may want to enable one or the other. In either situation, you are always prompted with a question which you must answer before you can continue. Awhile back I was looking into whether there were any CLI options to override this behavior and simply answer in advanced but did not see anything in the CLI help menu.

I recently ran into this again and while asking around, I came to learn that were are indeed two (hidden) options that can be used to override and disable these prompts, which can be useful for unattended automation purposes. Although these options are hidden from the CLI help options, I am not exactly sure why this is the case, they are officially documented in the TKG documentation.

  • --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you wish to deploy a TKG Management Cluster on vSphere 7
  • --enable-tkgs-on-vSphere7 can be used to confirm that you will be using the TKGs as your Management Cluster in vSphere 7

With this information, we can now pass in the --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7 option as shown in the example below and you will no longer be prompted:

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.30.127 --deploy-tkg-on-vSphere7