This project provides a VMware Virtual Appliance that pre-bundles all required dependencies for deploying Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) clusters.
The virtual appliance cannot provide the general requirements for the target platform (infrastructure provider). For example, to deploy a Management Cluster to vSphere you are required to meet the prerequisits lik an appropriate network setup wie DHCP.
The latest release is v0.12.1
After publishing this project I learned about the OVA Appliance for Tanzu Community Edition from Russell Hamker. It’s another amazing project, make sure to give it a spin as well.
I walked through a deployment example, with screenshots, on my blog.
- Read the "Before you begin" section of the documentation
- Prepare your vSphere environment as described
- If you want to use a service account, you can use this gist to automate the task with govc
- You should keep in mind that any reference to the "local bootstrap machine" in the documentation is now meant for your virtual appliance.
- Deploy the appliance, either locally with fusion/workstation or on vSphere.
- Power on the virtual appliance and wait for the customization process to finish.
- After the deployment finished you can open the installer UI to the port you specified during the installation.
- The default is <appliance_ip>:5555 for http and <appliance_ip>:5556 for https
- The installer will continue to run for approximately two minutes after the initial deployment of the appliance. The appliance is ready after the log entry "reverse proxy activiation".
- When you select leave the IP address empty, the appliance will default to DHCP network configuration.
- When you use DHCP network configuration, the DNS server input field will be ignored. The appliance will use the DNS server supplied by DHCP.
- The tanzu installer process will exit once you successfuly create a cluster.
- You need to restart the tanzu-bootstrap.service on the appliance or reboot the appliance if you want to deploy another cluster.
- You need to increase the appliance CPU and memory to the required minimums per documentation if you want to deploy a cluster local to the appliance with Docker.
When you launch the installation process over https/the secure port, the log output in the Web browser is blank. Cause: The logs are streamed using Gorilla WebSocket which has multiple issues when accessed with https. Workaround: The installation continues in the background. You can monitor the progress from the shell (for instance via SSH) by using journalctl -fl, follow the logs /var/log/tanzu-ce.log or use the non-secure port to view the output.
When you access the UI over https you will see a chrome security error and no button to proceed from here. Cause: The page fails to pass the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy. Workaround: You can type "thisisunsafe" in Chrome to ignore the error.
When you attempt to deploy the aplliance an error is shown "Issues detected with selected template: <...> No supported hardware ...". Cause: The appliance uses a virtual hardware version that requires a version that is compatible with vSphere 7 and later. Workaround: None. vSphere 6 is going out of general support soon.
- William Lam for supporting me here with his framework for the TKG Demo Appliance
- Erik Boettcher for running the first tests in his labs and calling out a set of bugs