Tanzu as Eminem sang "Guilty Conscience"

Hi Folks,

I was named a Tanzu Vanguard recently and ever since I have walked around with that heavy feeling. The thing is that I had only really played around with TCE, Tanzu Community Edition which VMware decided to sink for reasons that I don’t quite comprehend. So this weekend I bit the bullet and created my first workload cluster. I had a few weeks earlier created a supercluster which was reasonably straight forward. 

You need to download the Tanzu binary from your VMware account then untar the tar ball and cp to somewhere in your path:

tar xvf tanzu-cli-bundle-linux-amd64.tar.gz 

sudo cp tanzu-core-linux_amd64 /usr/local/bin/tanzu

You then run tanzu init

tanzu init

Next I ran the tanzu create cluster with user interface, you could also do this from the command line:

tanzu mc create --ui

This will bring up a web browser and lead you through the installation procedure:

Notice the link to the documentation in the upper right hand corner.

You have to have docker installed and the Tanzu installation process creates a temporary bootstrap cluster in Kind that in turn will deploy the supercluster or manager cluster in vsphere. 

Before that you have to upload one of the approved images to your catalogue (ubuntu or photon, versions might change so be sure to check the documentation).

This process takes a while but eventually you should see to VMs pop up in Vsphere:

I then found the contexts and switched to it

kubectl config get contexts

kubectl config use-context tkg-mgmt-vsphere-20230223201500-admin@tkg-mgmt-vsphere-20230223201500

And there they are the small 2 node management cluster that I had built:

Tanzu uses clusterapi (but with some of their own addons) to allow you to provision a workload cluster. In this way you can segragate workloads and bring up and scale clusters at will.

For simplicity sake I will copy the clusterconfig file that was created for the management cluster and then change the Endpoint IP and name of the yaml file:

After I am done I have a new cluster configuration file called work01.yaml

Now lets see if this actually works! For this we go back to leveraging the tanzu binary file:

tanzu cluster create --file /home/ober/.config/tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs/work01.yaml

It proceeds to perform its magic and I see activity in the command line and back in Vsphere. I had to run the command twice as the first time it said something about converting.. will need to do some reading in short… 

Ok no errors.. hurray! Lets check our new workload cluster:

tanzu cluster get work01

Sweet!

tanzu cluster list

That’s if for today. Next time I will login to the workload cluster and may even install Kasten to back it up :)