Tanzu Homelab: OverviewTanzu Homelab: Storage Policy and Content LibraryTanzu Homelab: Network PlanningTanzu Homelab: Deploy pfSenseTanzu Homelab: Deploy HAProxyTanzu Homelab: Deploy TanzuTanzu Homelab: Final Configurations

In the last post, we got Tanzu configured, however, before we can get any services deployed there are a few more items we need set up.

The first is getting a Namespace setup, followed by permissions and storage. Fortunately, all of these items are pretty quick to configure.

From the Workload Management page, go to Namespaces and click Create Namespace.

Choose a name for the namespace and select the network.

Done! That was quick. Now on the namespace page, we need to choose Add Permissions.

I used the devops@vsphere.local account I setup earlier. Because this is a homelab, I went ahead and gave it owner permissions.

Now we need to Add Storage.

Select the policy you previously created.

The last thing we want to do is add a VM Class and Content Library. These are in the VM Service block/widget.

When we add a VM Class we are basically telling Tanzu what size of VMs it is able to deploy. For my lab, I want it to deploy the smallest possible, so best-effort-xsmall for me.

After selecting VM Class let’s choose a content library.

That’s it. Although we could have done this before now, let’s make sure we can access the supervisors.

From the Supervisor page you will see a Control Plane node address. This is actually one of the HAProxy VIPs fronting for the control nodes. Anyway, lets hit that IP in a browser.

Looks good. Download the CLI plug for your OS of choice.

Next, we need to extract the content of the zip into our PATH. To check your path on Windows, simply type path in a command prompt. You should see something like this.

PATH=C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\;C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA NvDLISR;C:\Program Files\dotnet\;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\WINDOWS\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\

You can extract the contents to any of those folders, or potentially add a new folder to your PATH. I just extracted it to an existing folder.

Once that is done you should be able to connect to you supervisor cluster.

Great! Now we are connected to Tanzu so we should be able to easily deploy some resources/workloads

Unfortunately, after getting vSphere with Tanzu deployed, it seems we still cannot deploy pods or any resources. The reason for this is the vSphere with Tanzu deployment is deploying a Tanzu/K8s management cluster. Being a management cluster, it won’t let us deploy workloads. Yes, a bit annoying.

We have two options, the first option is we now deploy and Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster to our vSphere with Tanzu. This would create a workload Tanzu cluster where we would be able to deploy pods/services.

The second option is to use William Lam’s workaround in order to allow to deploy to the existing Tanzu cluster we just deployed.

In the spirit of trying to do things “by the book”, I tried to get TKC deployed. For some reason I have not yet figured out, it would never deploy for me. In the midst of this over several weeks I had some storms and power outages. After each outage, I could not get Tanzu back into a healthy place and ended up needing to start over.

At the end of the day and because of my frustration, I landed on using William Lam’s method to get resources deployed.

After stepping through William Lam’s post, I was able to get a small nginx deployment stood up.

Woohoo! If you have stuck with me through all these posts, WOW! Thank You! Hopefully, you were also able to get everything working. Now you should be able to deploy services to Tanzu! Have Fun!