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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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Guest Customization support for Instant Clone in vSphere 7

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vSphere Instant Clone was re-architected back in vSphere 6.7 and has been enhanced to be made more powerful and flexible. These enhancements not only power solutions like VMware Horizon but it also unlocks new customer use cases including things like Instant Cloning of Nested ESXi and Apple MacOS Guests.

Although the possibilities are truly endless with Instant Clone, this also means that any customization including basic guest identity such as hostname and networking must now use an alternative workflow. For application-level customization, it is expected that customers will create and manage these custom scripts but for basic networking configuration, it would be ideal to leverage the existing and well known vSphere Guest Customization Engine.

While downloading a file from MyVmware the other day, I came across an interesting set of packages called Guest Customization Engine for Instant Clone. Upon further investigation, I came to learn that these guest packages actually enable support for native vSphere Guest Customization for Instant Clone in vSphere 7 for the following Linux guest OSes:

  • CentOS 7.4 or higher
  • RHEL 6.8 or higher
  • RHEL 7.4 or higher
  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • SUSE 11SP4
  • SUSE 12SP3 or higher

In addition, there is also new set of vSphere (SOAP) APIs that you will need to interact with to use the new Instant Clone Guest Customization feature. The GuestCustomizationManager is a new vSphere 7.0 API which includes the following three API methods:

  • AbortCustomization_Task
  • CustomizeGuest_Task
  • StartGuestNetwork_Task

If you are interested in taking advantage of the new Instant Clone Guest Customization in vSphere 7, you can refer to the official VMware documentation which has step by step instructions.

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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