WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

Deploy Harbor in an Air-Gapped environment for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

by // 1 Comment

When using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and the new TKG CLI, outbound internet connectivity is required as part of the initial setup on the machine running TKG CLI but also on the TKG Management Cluster which is automatically stood up as part of the deployment. For demo and testing purposes, this is usually not a problem but for anyone looking to run this in a Production or datacenter environment, direct internet access is generally not available.

TKG does support air-gapped environments today by requiring a private container registry that has been configured with all the required containers. Once your registry has been setup, you will also need to update the TKG YAML manifest files to specify your private registry as by default, it will point to registry.tkg.vmware.run. You can use any container registry that is supported with Kubernetes including the popular Harbor solution. One thing to note is that your private registry must have a proper signed SSL certificate, custom CA certificates or self-signed certificates are not officially supported today with TKG.

Since I recently had to set this up for a project I am working on, which I hope to talk about in a future blog post, I thought it would be useful to share the instructions on how to setup and configure Harbor to be used in-conjunction with TKG as well as any other solution that requires a container registry running in your own environment. In my deployment, I will be using Let's Encrypt for generating the required SSL certificate, but you can use any existing service for performing this operation. I will also be installing Harbor on Photon OS, but you can use any operating system of your choice that Harbor is supported on.


Pre-Requisites 

  • Access to a public DNS domain which you have ownership of (e.g. adding new records)
  • Access to your internal DNS server to add a custom DNS zone lookup entry (e.g. registry.<yourdomain>.com)

[Read more...]

How to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster with Antrea CNI 

by // 1 Comment

I have been working with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) quite a bit lately and using their new slick TKG CLI for deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) which can run in both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as your on-premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment. If you have vSphere 7 and the vSphere with Kubernetes capability, it also supports TKG deployments natively as part of that solution but you can also use TKG CLI to deploy TKC's.

Out of the box, TKG includes all the necessary software components to deploy a production grade, upstream and conformant Kubernetes distribution. For most customers, the "batteries included" type of offering is more than sufficient but for some customers who may wish to customize some of these components further when running the standalone distribution. One such example is swapping out the default Container Network Interface (CNI) which uses Calico for a different CNI with more capabilities.


As you may have guess from the title of this post, we will be replacing Calico with Antrea which is another open source CNI. In fact, Antrea was started by VMware last year and uses Open vSwitch (OVS) to provide network and security capabilities to Kubernetes. You can read more about Project Antrea here and more details about its architecture can be found here.

Disclaimer: This is currently not officially supported by VMware. I do know the TKG team is looking at Antrea support in the future.

[Read more...]

Useful Interactive Terminal and Graphical UI Tools for Kubernetes

by // 10 Comments

I recently ran an internal hands-on workshop where I demonstrated to our field, marketing, support and engineering on just how easy it is to deploy and manage Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Clusters running on VMware Cloud on AWS. While developing the lab which has been several weeks in the making, I did not want to assume everyone was familiar with Kubernetes (K8s) and as part of the workshop, I thought it would be useful to include some additional utilities that would provide a better lab experience for those that are just getting started in their K8s journey.

I included tools like bat, kube-ps1 and Octant as an example and the weekend before the workshop, I came to learn about a really neat terminal-based UI tool called kubelive and I knew I had to include that in the workshop. Interestingly, after the workshop, several folks shared with me that they had not heard of this tool either and others on Twitter had the same feedback. Given the level of interests with K8s in the VMware community, especially with the launch of vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific), I thought it might be useful to share some of the terminal-based and graphical UI tools that I had been evaluating and learning about.

As of writing this blog post, my current two favorites is Octant for a graphical-based UI (browser) Headlamp Radar for a graphical based UI and K9s for a terminal-based UI.

Radar

In 2026, this is my current go to k8s-based visualization, which you can read more about HERE.

Headlamp

I noticed that many of the graphical tools listed below are no longer being developed as of Nov 2025. While doing a quick search to see what are the latest options in 2025, I came across Headlamp which looks to fit my need quite well. It is a desktop application that you can download and use for free and after importing your kubeconfig file, you can start interacting with the system. While I could have used K9s, I was looking for something more interactive and I found it be pretty easy to use after a few minutes and allowed me to quickly clean up some failed deployments with just a few clicks. Depending on your needs, you might still opt for a CLI-based tool like K9s or kubectl, but for those looking for something graphical, this might be one to consider.

Octant

Octant is a browser-based UI aimed at application developers giving them visibility into how their application is running. I also think this tool can really benefit anyone using K8s, especially if you forget the various options to kubectl to inspect your K8s Cluster and/or workloads. Octant is also a VMware Open Source project and it is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (including ARM) and runs locally on a system that has access to a K8S Cluster. After installing Octant, just type octant and it will start listening on localhost:7777 and you just launch your web browser to access the UI.

One thing I really like about Octant is how easy it is to switch context between different K8s Cluster with a simple drop down along with namespace filtering which is quite helpful in narrowing down a specific deployments, usually for informational or troubleshooting purposes.


Most of my workflows generally involves a specific K8s pod and the Resource View tab is super handy to give me a quick overview of the different resources that is associated whether that is a deployment, secret, service, etc.


The YAML tab beats using cat and bat, especially for really large and complex deployments and you can search right in the browser.
[Read more...]