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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

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.1

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Check out the newest release of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling which includes the following new features:

  • Support for the latest TKG 1.2.1 release
  • Support for TKG Workload Cluster upgrade workflow from Kubernetes v1.18.10 to v1.19.3
  • Updated embedded Harbor to use self-sign TLS certificate

One of the biggest feature I was excited for in the new TKG 1.2.1 release was support for an external container registry that was configured with a self-signed TLS certificate. Previously, TKG only supported container registries that were configured with a trusted CA signed certificate and that made it difficult for proof of concept/testing but also for environments that were air-gapped.

With previous releases of the TKG Demo Appliance, a valid TLS certificate was acquired from Let's Encrypt (LE) with the help of my good friend Ryan Johnson who owns the domain rainpole.io. The one downside to LE-based certificates is the short expiry period, which is every 90 days. This meant that any TKG Demo Appliance deployed after the expiry would stop functioning due to the certificate no longer being valid. Although I have been able to manage this by updating the appliance roughly every 90 days, usually in-conjunction with new release of TKG, it was less than ideal.

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How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?

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This weekend I spent some time installing Knative, which is an open source framework that is built on top of Kubernetes. Knative is actually made up of two core components, serving and eventing. This quote from Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile really sums up Knative quite nicely:

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability.

There are a number of tutorials online for setting up Knative, most of which using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) for easy local development. Since I have been spending quite a bit of time lately with both our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Multi-Cloud solution, which both support deploying conformant and production grade Kubernetes (K8s) Clusters called a TKG Guest Cluster, I figure I might as well learn how to install Knative using these infrastructures.

The instructions below will be focus on deploying the Knative serving components. Once you have that setup, it is easy to deploy the eventing components which you can follow the official Knative documentation.

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