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Search Results for: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Kubernetes on ESXi-Arm using k3s

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The tiny form factor of a Raspberry Pi (rPI) is a fantastic hardware platform to start playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling. You can already do a bunch of fun VMware things like running a lightweight vSAN Witness Node to setting up basic automation environment for PowerCLI, Terraform and Packer to running rPI OS as VM, enabling some neat use cases like consolidating your physical rPI assets which might be running RetroPi and Pi-Hole which many home labbers are doing.

In addition to VMware solutions, its is also a great platform to learn and tinker with new technologies like Kubernetes (K8s) which I am sure many of you have been hearing about 🙂 Although our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) does not currently work with the ESXi-Arm Fling, I have actually been meaning to try out a super lightweight K8s distribution designed for IoT/Edge called k3s (pronounced k-3-s) which also recently joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox level.

k3s is supported on rPI and you normally would have multiple rPI devices to represent the number of nodes, for example if you want a basic 3-Node cluster, you would need three physical rPI devices. With ESXi-Arm, you can now create these nodes as VM, using just a single rPI. This opens up the door for all sorts of explorations, you can create HA cluster or try out more advanced features which might be more difficult if you needed several physical devices. If you mess up, you can simply re-deploy the VM without much pain or simply clone the VM.

In my setup, I am using 3 x Photon OS VMs. One for the primary node and two for k3s worker nodes. You can certainly install k3s on any other Arm-based OS including rPI OS (which can now run as a VM as mentioned earlier).


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Admin account for embedded Harbor registry in vSphere with Kubernetes

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After setting up a vSphere with Kubernetes Cluster, customers have the option of enabling a built-in private container registry that can be used with the Supervisor Cluster. This private container registry uses the popular Opensource Harbor solution which is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.


Although this is a convenient capability, one thing to be aware of is that the embedded Harbor registry is limited in functionality compared to a standalone Harbor deployment and this is by design. When logging into Harbor with your vCenter SSO user, you will be able to do perform basic operations such as pushing and pulling images from this registry. For customers that require additional functionality from Harbor, it is recommended that you setup an external Harbor instance which can also be used as a common registry for both the Supervisor Cluster as well any Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Clusters that you may provision.

With that said, I have heard from a few folks who were interested in accessing the Harbor UI using the "admin" account, mostly from an exploration standpoint. The admin credentials for Harbor are dynamically generated each time the service is enabled and it is stored as a K8s secret within the Supervisor Cluster. This means the admin password is unique for each environment and the instructions below will show you how to obtain the credentials.

UPDATE (12/16/20) - I was informed by Engineering the ability to read K8s secrets was actually a bug and this has since been fixed in the latest release of vSphere with Tanzu. If you need the harbor credentials, you will need to directly login to the Supervisor Cluster from the VCSA (instructions have been updated below) to retrieve this information.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and the behaviors described below could change in the future without notice.

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Interesting Kubernetes application demos

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I am always on the lookout for cool and interesting demos to deploy, especially with some of the work I have been doing lately with vSphere with Kubernetes (K8s) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). I am sure many of you have probably seen the basic wordpress demos which seems to be the typical "Hello World" app for K8s and having something more compelling not only makes the demo more interesting but it can also help folks better understand how a modern applications can be built, deployed and run.

Below is a list of of the K8s demo applications that I have come across as part of my exploration and by no means is this an exhaustive list. I have been able to successfully deploy these applications running on the latest version of K8s (1.17 and 1.18) as I did come across other demos which did not work or I had issues setting up. If there are other K8s demos that folks have used, feel free to leave a comment and I will update the blog post after doing some basic testing.

For those of you who may not have a K8s environment and is running either vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or have access to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, you can easily setup a TKG Cluster in under 30 minutes leveraging my TKG Demo Appliance Fling.

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