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Building custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) for vSphere with Tanzu

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Right before going on PTO, I caught this really interesting tweet from my buddy Robert Guske that we now support building your own custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR), the Kubernetes software distributions that is signed and supported by VMware, which is typically provided by VMware through the online TKR Content Library.

While there are already a number of existing customizations that can be applied when deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes Workload Cluster (TKC), there may still be certain VM configurations that you would like to add, which is simply not possible today. In some of the customer requests, it can be as simple as changing the default size of the primary disk for a TKR, which is statically configured today as 20GB.

With this and many other use cases, it is nice to see that we now finally provide customers with a supported method to build their own custom TKR that might include additional customizations that is required by their organization for use with vSphere with Tanzu.

I recently got a chance to play with the new vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Image Builder tool, which is also an open source project from VMware and leverages the existing Kubernetes Image Builder, which I have also used before (see this blog post HERE for more details). While getting started, it took me a few tries but I eventually got it working after speaking with the Developers as I ran into a few issues.

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Project Pacific - Workload Evolution in vSphere 

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Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.


If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

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