Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 – deployment guide
As the documentation is still pretty dry and there is not so much information about that on the internet I’ve decided to post a series of articles describing the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid deployment based on the latest and greatest version 2.1. It’s intended to be a step by step guide that will walk you through the entire process from the begining till the end. Starting from the vSphere, NSX and ALB infrastructure preparation up to a deployment of a sample application in the workload cluster.
Table of Content:
- TKG deployment – prerequsities and BoM
- Harbor deployment for TKG
- TKG Management cluster deployment
- TKG Workload cluster deployment
- TKG package lifecycle management
- TKG integration with NSX Advanced LB for Ingress
- Connecting on-premises TKG clusters to Tanzu Mission Control
- Policy management with VMware Tanzu Mission Control
- Container backup with Velero
- TKG upgrade ( as soon as a new release is available 😉 )
- TKG multi-site design considerations
The overall setup will be very similar to the complete package listed in VMware’s documentation, presented below.
The only exception will be in the IaaS layer as I’m going to use only on-premises infrastructure. All components according to the BoM will be selected to use the latest, supported versions.
As part of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid following components are supported:
| Component | Version |
| Infrastructure platform | vSphere 6.7U3 vSphere 7 vSphere 8 |
| CLI, API, and package infrastructure | Tanzu Framework v0.28.0 |
| Cluster creation and management | Core Cluster API (v1.2.8), Cluster API Provider vSphere (v1.5.1) |
| Kubernetes node OS distributed with TKG | Photon OS 3, Ubuntu 20.04 |
| Build your own image | Photon OS 3, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7*** and 8, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Windows 2019 |
| Container runtime | Containerd (v1.6.6) |
| Container networking | Antrea (v1.7.2), Calico (v3.24.1) |
| Container registry | Harbor (v2.6.3) |
| Ingress | NSX Advanced Load Balancer (v21.1.3- v21.1.6, v22.1.1, v22.1.2), Contour (v1.22.3) |
| Storage | vSphere Container Storage Interface (v2.5.2*) and vSphere Cloud Native Storage |
| Authentication | OIDC via Pinniped (v0.12.1), LDAP via Pinniped (v0.12.1) and Dex |
| Observability | Fluent Bit (v1.8.15), Prometheus (v2.37.0), Grafana (v7.5.16) |
| Backup and migration | Velero (v1.9.5) |
In the upcoming articles I’ll describe the entire process as mentioned in the table of content.
If there is anything missing or something that you believe I should describe as part of this series – let me know!
One thought on “Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 – deployment guide”
Pawel and team, nice start and organization of your logic. Looking forward to seeing the output/deployment guide.