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Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Workload Cluster to Microsoft Azure

Following on from my previous blog post;

We will now continue and deploy our first Workload (Guest) Cluster into Azure for us by our developers to deploy their applications into.

For this technical walkthrough, I am assuming you have followed the previous blog post and have the Tanzu CLI and Kubectl CLI installed, and a working management cluster.

As a reminder of the terminology;

  • Tanzu Kubernetes Workload Clusters

Once you have deployed your management cluster, you can deploy additional CNCF conformant Kubernetes clusters and manage their full lifecycle. These clusters are designed to run your application workloads, managed via your management cluster. These clusters canrun different Kubernetes versions as required. These clusters use Antrea networking by default.

These types of clusters are also referred to as “workload” clusters, or “guest” clusters, with the latter typically referring to the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service running in vSphere.

Deploying a Guest Cluster

Login to your Tanzu environment Management Cluster with the following:

Tanzu login

Deploy Management cluster to Azure - Tanzu Login

First we need to create a cluster configuration YAML file. You can find a template here for Azure, or view the full available variables here.

Alternatively, we can use the existing YAML file in our ~/.tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs folder used for the management cluster deployment and change a few settings to make it ready for our workload guest cluster.

This was my preferred method as it contained all my Azure settings already.

#Find existing cluster config file
# Tanzu 1.3 Location
ls -lh ~/.tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs/

# Tanzu 1.4 location
ls -ls ~/.config/tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs/

#Copy file to a new config

cp ~/.tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs/6x4hl1wy8o.yaml tanzu-veducate-guest-azure.yaml

# Edit file = CLUSTER_NAME
# Workload cluster names must be 42 characters or less.

Deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Guest cluster to Azure - create cluster configuration yaml file Continue reading Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Workload Cluster to Microsoft Azure

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Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster to Microsoft Azure

In this blog post, we will detail a full technical run through on how to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) into Microsoft Azure,

This will be using the new Tanzu CLI (version 1.3) (Previously TKG CLI) released in March 2021, to deploy  both a new Management Cluster and Guest Cluster.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Types

TKG has two types of clusters, for the full information of TKG Concepts, please read this post.

  • Management Cluster

This is the first architectural components to be deployed for creating a TKG instance. The management cluster is a dedicated cluster for management and operation of your whole TKG instance infrastructure. A management cluster will have Antrea networking enabled by default. This runs cluster API to create the additional clusters for your workloads to run, as well as the shared and in-cluster services for all clusters within the instance to use.

It is not recommended that the management cluster be used as a general-purpose compute environment for your application workloads.

  • Tanzu Kubernetes (Guest) Clusters

Once you have deployed your management cluster, you can deploy additional CNCF conformant Kubernetes clusters and manage their full lifecycle. These clusters are designed to run your application workloads, managed via your management cluster. These clusters can run different Kubernetes versions as required. These clusters use Antrea networking by default.

These clusters are referred to as Workload Clusters when working with the Tanzu CLI.

I sometimes use the term “Guest” for these clusters, as a cross-over with the vSphere with Tanzu architecture, which has similar concepts as above however uses the terms “Supervisor Cluster” and “Guest Cluster”.

Pre-Requisites

For this blog post, I’ll be deploying everything from my local Mac OS X machine. You will need the following:

  • Docker installed with Kubernetes enabled
    • For Windows and macOS Docker clients, you must allocate at least 6 GB of memory in Docker Desktop to accommodate the kind container. See Settings for Docker Desktop in the kind documentation.
  • Install the Tanzu CLI and the Kubectl tool > Instructions here.
    • If you have used the TKG CLI before, then this is now deprecated.
    • You can find a full command line reference for Tanzu CLI and a comparison of the TKG CLI commands in this documentation link.
  • Install the Azure CLI.
  •  Register a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid App on Azure
    • The full details in the VMware docs for deploying TKG to Azure can be found here.
Login to the Azure CLI and accept the VM EULA

Before we get started, we need to log into the Azure CLI and accept the EULA for the images used for TKG in Azure. These images are updated with each release of the Tanzu CLI (TKG CLI).

az login

az vm image terms accept --publisher vmware-inc --offer tkg-capi --plan k8s-1dot20dot4-ubuntu-2004 --subscription {subscription_id}
az loginaz vm image terms accept --publisher vmware-inc --offer tkg-capi --plan k8s-1dot20dot4-ubuntu-2004 --subscription
Deploying a Management Cluster using the UI

From your terminal, run the following command:

tanzu management-cluster create --ui

tanzu management-cluster create --ui Continue reading Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster to Microsoft Azure

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vBrownBag Session – Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins

At VMworld 2018 I was invited to speak on the vBrownbag platform, which is a great community focused and run resource. Below is my session “Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins”

You can find the presentation here – http://vexpert.me/azure

Regards

Dean


o WOMAN JOB INTERVIEW facebook

Interview – Dave Kawula – MVP, Consultant, Author

2017 is kicking off with my third interview blog post, this time focusing on Dave Kawula, MVP and author focusing on Microsoft Technologies. Let’s kick off straight into the interview itself, Dave likes to type! Longest interview yet, but its a great read.

davekawula Clint

(Dave is the one on the left, little known fact, but there is more pictures of Dave and Clint Wyckoff together on twitter than Dave and his wife 🙂 )

The interview is split into three area’s of discussion;

  • Life and Worklife
  • Thoughts on the industry
  • Thoughts for those working in IT, and those wanting to work in IT
Lets kick off with a brief introduction of yourself

I’m a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. My background includes data communications networks within multi-server environments, led architecture teams for virtualization, System Center, Exchange, Active Directory, and Internet gateways. Very active within the Microsoft technical and consulting teams, providing deep-dive technical knowledge and subject matter expertise on various System Center and operating system topics. Continue reading Interview – Dave Kawula – MVP, Consultant, Author

read

And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

A little bit of a longer one than usual, as I was part way through writing this the other month, then I got distracted with other blog posts.

Hope you find some of these useful.

Documentation

EtherealMinds Eleven Rules of Design Documentation – This is one the best articles I’ve read in a long time, and reiterates the fact you need to keep it simple and a diagram replaces a thousand words.

Microsoft Continue reading And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing