Tag Archives: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

How to Deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster using the Cilium CNI

September 5, 2022VMware, KubernetesCilium, CNI, Deploy, Hubble, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, TKGDean

In this blog post I’m going to dive into how you can create a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster and specify your own container network interface, for example, Cilium. Expanding on the installation, I’ll also cover installing a load balancer service, deploying a demo app, and showing some of the observability feature as well.

What is Cilium?

Cilium is an open source software for providing, securing and observing network connectivity between container workloads - cloud native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF

Let’s unpack that from the official website marketing tag line.

Cilium is a container network interface for Kubernetes and other container platforms (apparently there are others still out there!), which provides the cluster networking functionality. It goes one step further than other CNIs commonly used, by using a Linux Kernel software technology called eBPF, and allows for the insertion of security, visibility, and networking control logic into the Linux kernel of your container nodes.

Below is a high-level overview of the features.

And a high-level architecture overview.

Is it supported to run Cilium in Tanzu Kubernetes cluster?

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid allows you to bring your own Kubernetes CNI to the cluster as part of the Cluster bring-up. You will be required to take extra steps to build a cluster during this type of deployment, as described below in this blog post.

As for support for a CNI outside of Calico and Antrea, you as the customer/consumer must provide that. If you are using Cilium for example, then you can gain enterprise level support for the CNI, from the likes of Isovalent.

Recording

How to deploy a Tanzu Kubernete Cluster with Cilium

Before we get started, we need to download the Cilium CLI tool, which is used to install Cilium into our cluster.

The below command downloads and installs the latest stable version to your /usr/local/bin location. You can find more options here. Continue reading How to Deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster using the Cilium CNI →

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – Upgrading a Management and Workload Cluster deployed to vSphere

June 28, 2022VMware, KubernetesCluster, management, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, TKG, Upgrade, vSphere, workloadDean

In this blog post, I am going to walk through how to upgrade both your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management and Workload clusters. I’ll cover the Tanzu CLI options, as well as how you can leverage the features of Tanzu Mission Control for upgrades as well.

For my example use cases, I’ll be upgrading from TKG 1.4.2 to 1.5.4. Although the process should be similar for other upgrade paths, I do recommend you consult the official documentation before attempting any upgrade in case there are any changes.

Caution: VMware recommends not installing or upgrading to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.0-v1.5.3, due to a bug in the versions of etcd in the versions of Kubernetes used by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.0-v1.5.3. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.4 resolves this problem by incorporating a fixed version of etcd. For more information, see Resolved Issues in the TKG v1.5 Release Notes.

Pre-requisites

To upgrade Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you download and install the new version of the Tanzu CLI on the machine that you use as the bootstrap machine. You must also download and install base image templates and VMs, depending on whether you are upgrading clusters that you previously deployed to vSphere, Amazon EC2, or Azure.

Download the Tanzu CLI and Kubernetes OVAs

On the VMware Customer Portal download both the Tanzu CLI and OVA files as necessary.

https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/details?downloadGroup=TKG-154&productId=988&rPId=88961

I’ve highlighted in the below screenshot; your Management Cluster will always need to run the latest Kubernetes version.

Upload Kubernetes OVAs to vCenter

Continue reading Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – Upgrading a Management and Workload Cluster deployed to vSphere →

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Workload Cluster to Microsoft Azure

March 29, 2021UncategorizedAzure, microsoft, Tanzu CLI, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, TKGDean

Following on from my previous blog post;

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster to Microsoft Azure

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

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.

Continue reading Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Workload Cluster to Microsoft Azure →

Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster to Microsoft Azure

March 29, 2021VMware, KubernetesAzure, Deploy, microsoft, Tanzu CLI, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, TKGDean

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}

Deploying a Management Cluster using the UI

From your terminal, run the following command:

tanzu management-cluster create --ui

Continue reading Deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster to Microsoft Azure →

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