This post is part of the Deploying vSphere with Kubernetes series.
    Part 6: Deploying vSphere with Kubernetes - Provisioning and Managing a Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

Part 6: Deploying vSphere with Kubernetes - Provisioning and Managing a Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

Apr 13, 2020 NSX Project Pacific vSphere with Tanzu
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vSphere 7 with Kubernetes is finally here and I couldn’t be more excited for it to be available. This blog series will cover the requirements, prequisites and deployment steps in order to deploy a vSphere with Kubernetes (vk8s) environment using vSphere 7 and NSX-T 3.0.

Now that we have the environment deployed, what can we do with it? This blog will cover deploying and using Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC). You can follow along in the official documentation

Provisioning Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

In our previous blog we covered the setup of the TKC Content Library, lets validate our namespace can see the images.

Authenticate to your vk8s cluster.

1kubectl vsphere login --server 10.21.234.65 --vsphere-username administrator@vsphere.local --insecure-skip-tls-verify

Once logged in you will be shown the contexts aka namespaces you have access to. Lets switch to our namespace.

1kubectl config use-context vk8s-ns-01

Execute the following to see what images are available.

1kubectl get virtualmachineimages

Execute the following to see what size TKC nodes we can deploy.

1kubectl get virtualmachineimages

From the above information we gathered we can now construct a YAML file to deploy our Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster. An example is available on GitHub.

The only items you should need to modify are the Name and Namespace for your TKC.

 1apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1 #tkg api endpoint
 2kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster #required parameter
 3metadata:
 4  name: vk8s-tkc-01 #cluster name, user defined
 5  namespace: vk8s-ns-01 #supervisor namespace
 6spec:
 7  distribution:
 8    version: v1.16 #resolved kubernetes version
 9  topology:
10    controlPlane:
11      count: 1 #number of master nodes
12      class: guaranteed-small #vmclass for master nodes
13      storageClass: vk8s-storage #storageclass for master nodes
14    workers:
15      count: 3 #number of worker nodes
16      class: guaranteed-small #vmclass for worker nodes
17      storageClass: vk8s-storage #storageclass for worker nodes

You can also deploy multiple TKC’s in a single YAML if you want, an example is available on GitHub.

Nowe we are ready to deploy your TKC!

1kubectl apply -f create-tkc-cluster.yaml

To monitor the status of your TKC Deployment I recommend following the events.

1kubectl get events -w

To Authenticate with our TKC execute the following command.

1kubectl vsphere login --server 10.21.234.65 --vsphere-username [email protected] --insecure-skip-tls-verify --tanzu-kubernetes-cluster-name tkc-01 --tanzu-kubernetes-cluster-namespace vk8s-ns-01

To validate its ready you can run

1kubectl get nodes

Managing Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

To Authenticate with our TKC execute the following command.

1kubectl vsphere login --server 10.21.234.65 --vsphere-username administrator@vsphere.local --insecure-skip-tls-verify --tanzu-kubernetes-cluster-name tkc-01 --tanzu-kubernetes-cluster-namespace vk8s-ns-01

Change Context to your TKC.

1kubectl config use-context tkc-01

Deploy your Workload! My favorite non-native pod demo application is the Hipster Shop!

1kubectl apply -f demo-hipstershop.yaml

Wait for all pods to be in a Running Status and then find out the External-IP and see if you can reach your application.

If your pods fail to run, you may need to modify the cluster RBAC and Pod Security Policies using this YAML.

1kubectl apply -f allow-runasnonroot-clusterrole.yaml

If everything was successful we can see our running application!

Wrap Up

Running TKC’s allow you to provision Kubernetes Clusters that can run any workload as they are k8s compliant! I hope you have been enjoying this series so far. What would you like to see next?

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