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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.0

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Happy to share that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling has been updated to support the latest TKG 1.2.0 release which just came out a couple of weeks ago. The TKG Workshop Guide has been updated to reflect all new TKG 1.2 changes along with an updated vSphere Content Library containing all the OVA required to get started. As mentioned in the workshop guide, you can use either a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (1-Node) or a vSphere 6.7 Update 3/vSphere 7.0+ environment.

The most notable change with this version is actually within TKG itself which now uses kube-vip to replace the functionality that the HAProxy VM used to provide. What this means when deploying either a TKG Management or Workload Cluster is that you will need to specify an IP Address which will be used for the Virtual IP endpoint of the K8s Cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

tkg init -i vsphere -p dev --name tkg-mgmt --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.10


Using the TKG Demo Appliance, you can deploy both v1.19.1 and v1.18.8 K8s Clusters. To exercise a TKG Cluster upgrade workflow, you just have to run these three simple commands:

export VSPHERE_TEMPLATE=photon-3-kube-v1.18.8_vmware.1
tkg create cluster tkg-cluster-01 --plan=dev --kubernetes-version=v1.18.8+vmware.1 --vsphere-controlplane-endpoint-ip 192.168.2.11
tkg upgrade cluster tkg-cluster-01


There has been a lot of demand for TKG on VMware Cloud on AWS, so that is where I have spent the bulk of my testing not to mention where it was originally developed. You can also deploy the TKG Demo Appliance in an on-premises vSphere environment running 6.7 Update 3 or newer.

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Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

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As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.1.3

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It has been awhile since I have updated my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling, which is a virtual appliance that enables anyone to go from zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes with just an SSH client and a web browser. For VMware Cloud on AWS customers interested in running TKG, this is a great way to quickly get started on a proof of concept, demo or for development and testing purposes. One great benefit is that everything required for TKG is self contained within the appliance including an embedded Harbor registry and the respective TKG container images, great for air-gapped or non-internet accessible environments.

Here is a summary of what is new:

Support for latest TKG 1.1.3

There have been several of smaller releases to TKG since their 1.0.0 release but due to their short lifecycle, I decided to hold off. Behind the scenes, I have actually been working closely with TKG team on the latest TKG 1.1.3 release which was just release last week. One really cool feature that was introduced in TKG 1.1.2 is the ability to upgrade an existing TKG Workload Cluster to a newer version of Kubernetes.

With TKG 1.1.3, support for Kubernetes v1.18.6 and v1.17.9 is now possible and the latest version of the demo appliance will also support this workflow. In fact, I have also updated my TKG Workshop Guide to include all new updates including the upgrade workflow. To reduce the maintenance burden on myself, the TKG Demo Appliance 1.0.0 will be removed in the near future, for now it has been deprecated but all existing content is still available. I highly recommend checking out the latest version as you will get all the latest features of TKG.

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