Search Results for: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Configuring NSX Advanced Load Balancer with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS

06.22.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

One of the exciting new features of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) 1.3 release is the support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) as a Layer-4 load balancer solution for your Kubernetes (K8s) based workloads. Most recently, there were a couple of customer inquiries asking whether TKG 1.3 and NSX ALB is supported on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and the answer is yes!

I suspect part of the reason on why this question came up is that it may have been difficult to find a clear support stance for this configuration and although there is some documentation in the AVI Portal for installing NSX ALB on VMConAWS, it certainly was not easy to find. I personally also found the instructions to a be on the lighter side after reading through a few times. Since I already had my TKG Demo Appliance Fling deployed in my VMConAWS SDDC, it was easy enough to un-deploy my existing TKG Management Cluster and set it up with NSX ALB. You can find the detailed instructions below and although the setup of NSX ALB and TKG is similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment as recently documented by Cormac Hogan, there are still some subtle differences, especially if you are not placing both TKG and NSX ALB systems all on the same single, which you may find in demos 🙂

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How to create a custom Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Node OVA based on Photon OS Real Time Kernel?

06.17.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

One really cool feature of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is the ability to bring your custom images (BYOI) which can then be used to deploy TKG Workload Clusters. To do so, customers will need to use Kubernetes (K8s) Image Builder tool to author new OVA images and then make TKG aware by updating the Tanzu Kubernetes Release (TKR) Build of Materials (BOM) configuration.

I had played around with Image Builder awhile back during the TKG 1.2 release and it definitely was not very easy to use. I have been meaning to kick the tires on Image Builder again as I know with the latest 1.3.x release, there have been a number of improvements. This week I saw an inquiry from my buddy Alan Renouf who was looking to see if there was a way to use the new Photon OS Real Time Kernel as a base image for a K8s-based application that he was working with that had requirements for the real time kernel.

Interestingly enough, there was another inquiry with a similiar customer request for their edge deployment and I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Image Builder again, which has been overhauled and the build process can be completely consumed as a Docker container, which definitely made things much easier than before. I also had never played with real time version of Photon OS, so this gave me a reason to try that out which was initially introduced with Photon OS 4.0 but it also looks like real time kernel was added to 3.0 recently, which is the version I had used to test.

Note: vSphere with Tanzu currently does not support the ability to bring your own image like TKG, I know this is something that has been asked about and is being considered in the future.

The BYOI process for TKG is comprised of two steps:

Create Custom TKG OVA
Update TKG with new TKR BOM

Although there are detailed documentation for this process, I still ran into a number of issues which I think the documentation could be improved with a complete working example rather than using generic values which lead to some interpretation, which I did not interpret correctly the first time through. After posting some questions in the Image Builder Slack Channel, I was able to finally connect the dots with the help from Scott Rosenberg, who I also knew, as a customer of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. Putting everything together, I figure it would be useful to document the process I took and hopefully this can benefit other customers looking to build and consume their own OVA images with TKG.

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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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