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Can I deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu on same vSphere Cluster?

06.09.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A simple question with a simple answer, yes! I have seen this question get asked in various internal Slack channels on whether you can deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu (formally Project Pacific) on the same vSphere Cluster? If you were an early user of TKG, you may recall that if you attempted to deploy TKG to a vSphere Cluster which already had vSphere with Tanzu enabled, it would prevent you from proceeding. Instead of having to deploy another Kubernetes management control plane, you could simply leverage and connect to the Supervisor Cluster control plane using the TKG CLI and start deploying TKG Workload Clusters.

From a technical standpoint, there is no reason that TKG and vSphere with Tanzu could not co-exist on the same vSphere Cluster. In fact, this request has come up a number of times that the original TKG behavior has been recently updated to now allow for this co-existence. From an exploratory and learning point of view, this is quite useful to be able to try out both solution and not have to dedicate a specific vSphere Cluster for each of the Tanzu Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. A more practical use case that came up recently from a customer was being able to use both solution as a way to consolidate their workloads using a specific Tanzu K8s solution, which makes total sense. Today, there are still some differences in terms of the features and capabilities between TKG and vSphere with Tanzu and depending on your needs, you may have a use case for both in your environment.

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Categories // VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere with Tanzu

Quick Tip - Accessing the VM Console for VMs deployed using vSphere with Tanzu VM Service

05.20.2021 by William Lam // 2 Comments

One constraint of the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service, which was introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 2a is that the VM Console of the deployed VM is not accessible by end users including vSphere Administrators.


When things are working fine, this is generally not needed but when something goes wrong such as debugging or troubleshooting guest customization or networking issues, then having access to the VM Console is a must! In speaking with the VM Service PM, this is already being tracked in their backlog and hopefully we will have a solution for this in the future.

For now, there is a quick workaround which I have personally used it myself while deploying Nested ESXi VMs using the VM Service. Since this question has come up a few times now, I wanted to document the specific instructions and make it easy for anyone who may have a need for this. 100% Credit goes to Florian Grehl who shared this solution on his blog but on a completely unrelated topic.

UPDATE (05/20/21) - Florian also shared via Twitter, another and quicker way to access the VM Console is if you have direct ESXi host access, you can access the VM Console that way as well. I am usually logged into vCenter Server anyhow, so I prefer method outlined below.

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Categories // VMware Tanzu Tags // vSphere with Tanzu

Exploring the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service with Nested ESXi

05.05.2021 by William Lam // 3 Comments

After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, I was looking forward to kicking the tires on the highly anticipated vSphere with Tanzu Virtual Machine Service capability. Both Oren Penso and Myles Gray have both done a fantastic job on their respective blogs here and here demo'ing the new VM Service.

While browsing through Oren's Github repo since I came across his blog post first, a couple of things quickly caught my attention. The first was a reference to OvfEnv transport with the YAML manifests and the second was that he was able to deploy an Ubuntu VM, which is interesting since only CentOS is currently officially supported. Why was this interesting? Well,Β with these two pieces of information, I had a pretty good theory on how the guest customizations were being passed into the GuestOS for configuration and this gave me an idea πŸ€”

I decided to put my hypothesis to the test and try out the VM Service and deploy one of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance and as you can see from the tweet below, it worked! 🀯

πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

It freaking worked! Go @VMwareTanzu#NestedESXi pic.twitter.com/udTdwvLbgN

— William Lam (@lamw) May 4, 2021

Disclaimer: vSphere with Tanzu and the VM Service currently only officially supports CentOS images for deployment, other operating systems are currently not supported. This is primarily for educational and experimentation purposes only.

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Categories // Automation, Nested Virtualization, VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Nested ESXi, VM Service, vSphere with Tanzu

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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