Offline Requirements

During a recent Tanzu engagement, my customer wanted to make use of the VMware Tanzu Packages to extend the core functionalities of their existing Kubernetes clusters. As a requirement, an offline deployment of the Packages was raised, which in other words means, deployments from their own private container registry. The intention behind it is simple.

All of the Tanzu Packages shown in Table I below are provided by VMware. VMware is ensuring that the images for the Packages are stable, secure and compliant. But in order to deploy a Package, we need unristricted internet acceess to *.projects.registry.vmware.com. To bypass this “online” requirement, deploying the Packages from a private container registry like Harbor for example, is a typical use case for most clients.

The Challenge

Just providing a Kubernetes cluster to an application team is in most cases half of the battle. It’s often necessary to provide certain capabilities for e.g. logging or for ingress to those clusters, to ultimately support a production workload. Extending Kubernetes environments with open source solutions, to support the aforementioned capabilities, should provide a decent level of simplicity in terms of deployment and lifecycle management.

A Catalog of Extensions

Tanzu Mission Control, a VMware Cloud Service (SaaS), is VMware’s multi-cloud Kubernetes management platform which provides a centralized management for consistently operating and securing Kubernetes infrastructures and modern applications through a centralized policy management across all deployed and attached Kubernetes clusters.

A hands on guide which covers the deployment and configuration of the Avi Kubernetes Operator and to ultimately integrate it with the NSX Advanced Load Balancer to make use of the modern and comprehensive features of VMware's Next Gen Load Balancer.

The vSphere ESX Manager manages the life-cycle of agent VIBs and VMs. This post will give you an idea how it can help if one of your Supervisor Control Plane VMs stucks in state NotReady.

I couldn't install the VMware ovftool on my Ubuntu 20.04 LTS client and because of this, I'm going to explain how you can run it without having it installed.

VMware Fusion can instantiate KinD clusters locally on your desktop (project Nautilus) but recently I discovered some restrictions which I'm explaining in this post.