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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance for VMC and vSphere

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As some of you can probably tell from my recent Twitter updates and blog posts (here and here) that I have been spending some time lately with both vSphere with Kubernetes and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). Like many of you in the community, I am still pretty new to Kubernetes (K8s) and I am still learning about what it has to offer both from an infrastructure standpoint but more importantly how it can be used to deliver new and modern applications. I am also very lucky to be part of the the VMware Event Broker Appliance Open Source Fling project which builds and runs on top K8s and this project has allowed me to really get hands on which is how I learn best.

A couple of months back I was asked to put together a workshop to demonstrate how to deploy TKG Clusters running on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and while developing the workshop, I thought it would be really cool if I could make it even easier for anyone that is brand new to K8s to quickly get started with TKG. I wanted to have a solution that can literally be dropped into any supported vSphere-based environment with basic networking to go from Zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes!

Enter the Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Fling

A Virtual Appliance that pre-bundles all required dependencies to help customers in learning and deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters running on either VMware Cloud on AWS and/or vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment for Proof of Concept, Demo and Dev/Test purposes. This appliance will enable you to quickly go from zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes with just an SSH client and a web browser!


In addition to the appliance, I have also put together a step by step workshop-style guide which not only walks you through in deploying your first TKG Cluster but also provide some example demos and references which you can explore further. Below are some of the highlights of the Demo Appliance for TKG:

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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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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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