{"id":574,"date":"2021-03-21T19:35:08","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T18:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vmware.nicolas-frey.de\/blog\/?p=574"},"modified":"2021-03-22T09:59:16","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T08:59:16","slug":"hands-on-kubernetes-with-vmware-tanzu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vmware.nicolas-frey.de\/blog\/technology\/hands-on-kubernetes-with-vmware-tanzu\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands on Kubernetes with VMware Tanzu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rapid change is among us. We are flooded with new concepts and technologies. This article will dive into the new possibilities to host cloud native workloads in the vSphere environment. Actually, VMware released a new suite of products in April 2020 named Tanzu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I finished designing and implementing my new home-lab environment based on VMware vSphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, I could deploy and test many new VMware products and features like vSphere 7 U2, vSAN, vRealize Automation 8.3 and vRealize Orchestrator 8.3. Meanwhile, I feel in love with infrastructure as code. So, I created and edited several JSON & YAML files to get my infrastructure up and running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this week the time came to build up a nested environment that is capable to run vSphere with Kubernetes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to vSphere 7 U2 Tanzu is now supported with three different load balancing setups: NSX-T the most expensive, HA proxy which is free and new in U2, NSX advanced load balancer essentials free as well. Without load balancing neither Container nor Kubernetes will work properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My choice for lab was HA proxy because my nested environment was built stable & lightweight on vSphere 7 U1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What is a Container and Kubernetes?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now I won’t dive deep into Containers and Kubernetes at this moment. But I think a crash course is essential to understand the need for TANZU and its USP (unique selling proposition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Container<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You can compare them with virtual machines they are just more lightweight and faster to spin up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They can offer diverse apps\/services mostly in the cloud native ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you couple one or more containers the next layer above is a POD. One container host which can be either physical or virtual can host huge amounts of containers. Containers are deployed from container images which are comparable to VM templates. Each created Container contributes to a service and doesn’t have an own IP address but shares it with the host. So, that’s why the load balancers are crucial. They distribute the request to one or many containers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kubernetes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The core duty of Kubernetes is to handle the complexity and automate the deployment and scaling of PODs which contain one or more containers. Kubernetes itself has a control plane and worker nodes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The control plane manages and stores container data in a key value database (etcd).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nodes are literally hosting the container and execute a new POD derived from a container image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So containers become enterprise grade, you can scale and make them high available via replica sets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, the environmental state is always monitored and faulty or crashed containers are quickly redeployed via the concept of desired state. Developers communicate with the control plane via kubectl commands and essentially describe the design via YAML files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Source: https:\/\/kubernetes.io\/docs\/home\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

TANZU – Solution Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By the way, Tanzu is derived from the Japanese word Tansu (Jap.<\/a> \u7baa\u7b25) that is an antique lightweight wooden cabinet. No paper anymore now digital transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thanks to Leon Gao<\/strong> @ Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The software version is a suite of products that offer key capabilities in three different pillars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are Run, Manage and Build. I think this overview is a good way to start, and today we absolutely focus on the “Run” part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Source: VMware<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Basically, the key function of Tanzu is to enable the vSphere infrastructure to natively run Containers and ease management with the orchestration through Kubernetes. So, it is the above master layer which acts as a bridge between the legacy and cloud native world. It offers huge enterprise grade integrations to consume SDDC resources in the container and Kubernetes world. Furthermore, it offers a secure and efficient way to make it possible for administrators to support the developers. This is truly DevOps and no bullshit bingo anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So TANZU is nothing proprietary it is fully upstream Kubernetes compliant. One vSphere Cluster can automatically deploy and manage almost unlimited amounts of custom size Kubernetes clusters to run enterprise services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every department can get their DEV and PROD clusters to have isolation and security. It runs on the same easy to manage and high available platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite that you can run VMs in these supervisor clusters too, just magical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technical Details<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First you always have to prepare the requisites:<\/p>\n\n\n\n