VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services designed to help organizations build, run, and manage modern applications on Kubernetes. VMware Tanzu provides tools and solutions that enable enterprises to embrace containerization, microservices architecture, and cloud-native application development practices. It is part of VMware’s vision for supporting modern application development and deployment in a multi-cloud environment.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG):
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a Kubernetes distribution that can be run on-premises or in the public cloud. It provides a consistent, upstream-compatible Kubernetes runtime across environments, making it easier for organizations to manage and scale containerized applications.
- Tanzu Mission Control:
- Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized management platform for Kubernetes clusters. It enables organizations to provision, operate, and manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds and on-premises environments from a single control plane.
VMware Tanzu is designed to provide a comprehensive platform for organizations to modernize their application development practices and adopt cloud-native technologies. It supports a variety of infrastructure environments, including on-premises data centres and various public cloud providers. Most of today’s kubernetes deployments run on top of VMware virtual machines. The high-level architecture is something like the one below.
Images source: VMware.com
Tanzu brings new dimensions to the modern kubernetes deployment model. This is beneficial if you have an investment in a VMware environment and trying to explore kubernetes for microservices.
To know what we have in the supervisor layer, look at the following image.
Let’s see how we can spin up Kubernetes in vSphere.
Pre-requisites:
- 3 – Node Cluster HA cluster + DRS enabled
- vCenter Server
- HAPROXY appliance for Load balancing
- Content Library
1. Login into vCenter and click on Workload Management from the main menu.
2. Select the vCenter and network stack for the deployment. It supports both NSX & vDS.
3. I do not have enough resources to set up vSphere zones. I have selected “Cluster Deployment” which is compatible with Tanzu Grid.
4. Select the control plane storage policy. You can view the datastore based on the selected policy and pick the datastore.
5. Select the load balancer type and configure the virtual IP ranges. In my case, I have selected HAproxy as the load balancer. TLS certificate of the VM can be abstracted from VM settings.
6. Configure the management network for the supervisor cluster.
7. Configure the workload network.
8. Select the content library for the k8s.
Once you have selected the content library, click OK to continue and click on “Finish” to complete the wizard.
Enabling Tanzu Grid would take 30 to 45 minutes to complete the deployment of the supervisor cluster. It could vary depending on hardware capacity.
Once the supervisor is successfully deployed, you can see the cluster status in the “summary” tab.
Hope this article has given a fair idea of how to enable Tanzu on existing vSphere nodes.