Installing Tanzu Community Edition on vSphere — Some Quick Notes

Published by Christian Mohn · Read in about 2 min (350 words)
TCE Tanzu K8s Home Lab vSphere

Installing Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) on vSphere is well documented on the tanzucommunityedition.io site, but I ran into a couple of small quirks when installing it in my home lab.

Bind the installer to the external IP of the bootstrap machine #

The TCE installer offers a browser based installation wizard, but the default command binds the interface to the localhost interface, and opens port 8080 in a local browser.

tanzu management-cluster create --ui

Since I’m using a dedicated bootstrap VM here, over ssh, that doesn’t really work all the well. Thankfully it’s easy to change, just start the installer with this command instead, which also doesn’t try to pop a local browser.

tanzu management-cluster create --ui --bind <VM IP>:8080 --browser none

This binds the installer interface to port 8080 on the vNIC in the VM, and makes it available from a browser in the same network.

Tanzu Community Edition Installer

Pick your distro carefully #

I normally use Ubuntu for all my Linux needs, and decided to do so for the bootstrap machine required to install TCE. After spinning up a new VM from an Ubuntu 21.10 template I already had available, and installing all the Tanzu CLI requirements, it failed bringing bootstrapping the the management cluster in vSphere. This was due to Ubuntu 21.10 using cgroup2 by default, something that is currently unsupported in TCE v0.10.0. Note that TCE v0.11.0 version that is currently in RC1 fixes this, and it shouldn’t be a problem once that has been released.

After messing about with trying to change Docker on Ubuntu 21.10 to use cgroup1 for a while, I decided it was just easier to deploy a new Ubuntu boostrap VM for this, based on Ubuntu 16.04 — which uses cgroup1 by default.

Once I changed the Ubuntu version, and followed the installation guides I was able to get the TCE management cluster installed in my vSphere environment.

Tanzu Management Cluster deployed

Now I just need to figure out how to use it, and start moving some of the container based services I run in my local network over to it. Time to get to work in the new lab!
Post last updated on January 2, 2024: Add author

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