This will be a quick blog to demonstrate how to enable the (embedded) Harbor Image Registry in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. Harbor was originally developed by VMware as a enterprise-grade private container registry. It was then donated to the CNCF in 2018 and recently became a CNCF graduated project.
For this demo, we’ll activate the embedded Harbor register within the vSphere 7 Kubernetes environment, and integrate it with the Supervisor Cluster for container management and deployment.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
1x vSphere 7 with Kubernetes cluster (you can build one following this post)
Enabling the embedded Harbor Registry in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes
To begin, go to your vSphere 7 “Workload Cluster —> Namespaces —> Image Registry”, and then click “Enable Harbor”.
Make sure to select the vSAN storage policy to provide persistent storage as required for the Harbor installation.
The process will take a few minutes, and you should see 7x vSphere Pods after Harbor is installed and enabled. Take a note of the Harbor URL — this is an external address of the K8s load balancer that is created by NSX-T.
Push Container Images to Harbor Registry
First, let’s log into the Harbor UI and take a quick look. Since this is embedded within vSphere, it supports the SSO login 🙂
Harbor will automatically create a project for every vSphere namespace we have created. In my case, there are two projects “dev01” and “guestbook” created, which are mapped to the two namespaces in my vSphere workload cluster.
Click the “dev01” project, and then “repository” — as expected it is currently empty, and we’ll be pushing container images to this repository for a quick test. However, before we can do that we’ll need to download and import the certificate to our client machine for certificate-based authentication. Click the “Registry Certificate” to download the ca.crt file.
Next, on the local client create a new directory under /etc/docker/cert.d/using the same name as the registry FQDN (URL).
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# cd /etc/docker/certs.d/
[root@pacific-ops01 certs.d]# mkdir 192.168.100.133
[root@pacific-ops01 certs.d]# cd 192.168.100.133/
[root@pacific-ops01 192.168.100.133]# vim ca.crt
Now, let’s get a test (nginx) image, tag it, and try to push it to the dev01 repository.
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# docker login 192.168.100.133 --username administrator@vsphere.local
Password:
Login Succeeded
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# docker pull nginx
Using default tag: latest
Trying to pull repository docker.io/library/nginx ...
latest: Pulling from docker.io/library/nginx
bf5952930446: Pull complete
cb9a6de05e5a: Pull complete
9513ea0afb93: Pull complete
b49ea07d2e93: Pull complete
a5e4a503d449: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b0ad43f7ee5edbc0effbc14645ae7055e21bc1973aee5150745632a24a752661
Status: Downloaded newer image for docker.io/nginx:latest
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]#
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
docker.io/nginx latest 4bb46517cac3 3 days ago 133 MB
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]#
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# docker tag docker.io/nginx 192.168.100.133/dev01/nginx
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]#
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# docker push 192.168.100.133/dev01/nginx
The push refers to a repository [192.168.100.133/dev01/nginx]
550333325e31: Pushed
22ea89b1a816: Pushed
a4d893caa5c9: Pushed
0338db614b95: Pushed
d0f104dc0a1f: Pushed
latest: digest: sha256:179412c42fe3336e7cdc253ad4a2e03d32f50e3037a860cf5edbeb1aaddb915c size: 1362
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]#
It works, perfect! Now refresh the repository and we can see the new nginx image we just pushed through.
Deploy Kubernetes Pods to Supervisor Cluster from the Harbor Registry
Let’s run a quick test to deploy a Pod using the nginx image from our Harbor Registry. First, log into the Supervisor Cluster and switch to the “dev01” namespace/context.
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl apply -f nginx-demo.yaml
pod/nginx-demo created
Monitor the events and soon we can see the Pod is deployed successfully from the image fetched from the Harbor repository.
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl get events -n dev01
LAST SEEN TYPE REASON OBJECT MESSAGE
48s Normal Status image/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 pacific-esxi-3: Image status changed to Resolving
40s Normal Resolve image/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 pacific-esxi-3: Image resolved to ChainID sha256:80b21afd8140706d5fe3b7106ae6147e192e6490b402bf2dd2df5df6dac13db8
40s Normal Bind image/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 Imagedisk 80b21afd8140706d5fe3b7106ae6147e192e6490b402bf2dd2df5df6dac13db8-v0 successfully bound
32s Normal Status image/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 Image status changed to Fetching
14s Normal Status image/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 Image status changed to Ready
7s Normal SuccessfulRealizeNSXResource pod/nginx-demo Successfully realized NSX resource for Pod
<unknown> Normal Scheduled pod/nginx-demo Successfully assigned dev01/nginx-demo to pacific-esxi-1
50s Normal Image pod/nginx-demo Image nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 bound successfully
39s Normal Pulling pod/nginx-demo Waiting for Image dev01/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0
14s Normal Pulled pod/nginx-demo Image dev01/nginx-4f70b77c704ff28acdf14ce0405bc1811e8ee077-v0 is ready
7s Normal SuccessfulMountVolume pod/nginx-demo Successfully mounted volume default-token-bqxc2
7s Normal Created pod/nginx-demo Created container nginx-demo
7s Normal Started pod/nginx-demo Started container nginx-demo
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl get pods -n dev01
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
nginx-demo 1/1 Running 0 60s
Use kubectl describe pod to confirm the nginx Pod is indeed running on the image pulled from the Harbor registry.
This blog provides a guide to help you deploying Contour Ingress Controller onto a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster. Contour is an open source Kubernetes ingress controller that exposes HTTP/HTTPS routes for internal services so they are reachable from outside the cluster. Like many other ingress controllers, Contour can provide advanced L7 URL/URI based routing and load balancing, as well as SSL/TLS termination capabilities.
Contour was originally developed by Heptio (VMware) and has been recently handed over to CNCF as an incubating project. Contour consists of a control plane that is provisioned via a K8s deployment, and an Envoy-based data plane running as a Daemonset on every cluster worker node.
Download the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.1 Extension manifestsat here
For this lab, we’ll install the Contour ingress controller onto a TKG cluster, and we’ll then deploy a sample app (supplied within the manifest) for testing the Ingress services. The overall service topology will look like this:
Install the Contour Ingress Controller
To begin, unzip the TKG extension manifest (I’m using v1.1.0).
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# tar -xzf tkg-extensions-manifests-v1.1.0-vmware.1.tar.gz
Log into your TKG cluster and make sure you are in the correct context.
Next, install the Cert-Manager (for Contour Ingress) onto the TKG cluster.
Before we can install Contour and Envoy, we’ll need to make a small change to the Envoy service config (02-service-envoy.yaml). As illustrated in the service topology, we will deploy a LoadBalancer in front of the ingress controller. So we’ll update the Envoy service type from NodePort (default) to LoadBalancer.
Now deploy Contour and Envoy onto the cluster.
We can see a Contour deployment, and an Envoy daemonset of 3x (we have 3 worker nodes) have been deployed under the namespace of tanzu-system-ingress. Also, take a note of the external IP (192.168.100.130) of the Envoy LoadBalancer service as this will be used by our Ingress services.
Deploy a Sample App for testing Ingress Services
Deploy the sample app from within the manifest, this will create:
one new namespace called “test-ingress”
one deployment of the “helloweb” app, with a Replicaset of 3x Pods
two separate services called “s1” & “s2” — Note: both services are actually pointing to the same 3x Pods (as they are using the same Pod selector)
Verify the Pods are up and running
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl get pods -n test-ingress
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
helloweb-7cd97b9cb8-qjwtk 1/1 Running 0 50s
helloweb-7cd97b9cb8-r9s8g 1/1 Running 0 51s
helloweb-7cd97b9cb8-swztl 1/1 Running 0 51s
and both services (s1 & s2) are deployed as expected.
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl get svc -n test-ingress
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
s1 ClusterIP 10.40.183.104 <none> 80/TCP 1m
s2 ClusterIP 10.40.129.12 <none> 80/TCP 1m
We can’t get to these services yet as they are internal K8s services (ClusterIP) only. We’ll need to deploy an Ingress object so that Contour can expose these services and route traffic to them from external. The good news is that there’s already an Ingress config template provided in the manifest. I’ve made the following changes to the template as per my lab environment (my lab domain is vxlan.co). Note the hostname (URL) and the path (URI) as we’ll be using these to access the two services.
Deploy the Ingress object.
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# cd tkg-extensions-v1.1.0/ingress/contour/examples/https-ingress
[root@pacific-ops01 https-ingress]# kubectl apply -f .
ingress.extensions/https-ingress created
secret/https-secret created
Verify the Ingress service is running as expected
[root@pacific-ops01 https-ingress]# kubectl get ingress -n test-ingress
NAME HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE
https-ingress ingress.vxlan.co 80, 443 2m
Create a DNS record with the ingress hostname by pointing to the Envoy load balancer external IP.
In this post we’ll explore the vSphere 7 with Kubernetes capabilities and the detailed deployment steps in order to provision a vSphere supervisor cluster and a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster.
If you are new to vSphere 7 and Tanzu Kubernetes, below are some background readings that can be used as a good start point:
I’ll be building a nested vSphere7/VCF4 environment in my home lab ESXi host, and the overall lab setup looks like below:
As you might have guessed, this lab requires a lot of resources! In specific you’ll need the following:
physical ESXi host running at least vSphere 6.7 or later
capacity to provision VM with up to 8x vCPU
capacity to provision up to 140-180GB of RAM
around 1TB of spare storage
a flat /24 subnet connected to external & Internet (can be shared with lab management network)
access to vSphere 7 ESXi/VCSA and NSX-T/Edge 3.0 OVA files and trial licenses
In order to save time on provisioning the vSphere/VCF stack, I’m using William Lam‘s vSphere 7 automation script as discussed here. You can find the PowerShell code and further details at his Git repository.
All demo apps and configuration yaml files used in this lab can be found at my Git Repo.
We’ll cover the following steps:
#1 – build a (nested) vSphere7/VCF4 stack
#2 – configure workload management and deploy supervisor cluster
#3 – deploy a demo app with native vSphere Pod services
First, you’ll need to download William’s PowerShell script and modify it based on your own lab environment. You’ll also need to download the required OVAs and place them in the same path as defined in the script — Note for the VCSA you’ll need to unzip the ISO and point the path to the unzipped folder!
Now let’s run the PowerShell script and you’ll see a deployment summary page like this:
Hit “Y” to kickoff the deployment and for me the whole process took just a little over 1 hour.
Once the script completes you should see a vAPP look like this deployed under your physical ESXi host.
Step-2: Configure Workload Management and Deploy Supervisor Cluster
To activate vSphere 7 native Kubernetes capabilities, we need to enable workload management which will configure our nested ESXi cluster as a supervisor cluster. First, log into the nested VCSA, and navigate to “Menu” —> “Workload Management”, click “Enable”:
Select our nested ESXi cluster to be configured as a supervisor cluster
Select supervisor Control Plane VM size
Configure the management network settings for the supervisor cluster, note that we’ll need to reserve a 5-address block for the control plane VMs including a VIP.
Next, configure vSphere Pod network settings — for this demo we’ll reserve one /27 for the Ingress CIDR block as the NAT IPs to be consumed by Load Balancer or Ingress services; and another /27 for the Egress CIDR block as outbound SNAT IPs for provisioned K8s namespaces.
Configure storage policies by selecting the pre-provisioned pacific-gold vSAN policy, then click “Finish” to begin the deployment of supervisor cluster.
This process will take another 20~30 mins to complete, and you’ll see a cluster of 3x control plan VMs being provisioned.
Back to the “Workload Management” —> “Cluster”, you should see our supervisor cluster (consists of 3x ESXi hosts) is now up and running. Also, take a note of the VIP address of the control plan VMs as we’ll be using that IP to log into the supervisor cluster.
Step-3: Deploy a demo app with Native vSphere Pods
To consume the native vSphere Kubernetes Pods capabilities, we need to firstly create a vSphere Namespace, which is mapped to a K8s namespace within the supervisor cluster. vSphere leverages the K8s namespace logical construct to provide resource segmentation for the vSphere pods/services/deployments, and it offers a flexible way to attach authorization and network/storage policies for different environments.
Go to “Menu” —> “Workload Management”, and click “Create Namespace”.
Since we’ll be deploying a sample guestbook app, we’ll name the namespace “guestbook”.
Next, grant the vSphere admin with editor’s permission to the namespace, and assign the vSAN storage policy “pacific-gold-storage-policy” for the namespace —> this is important as (behind the scene) we are leveraging the vSANCSI (container storage interface)driver to provide persistent storage support for the cluster.
Now we are ready to dive into the vSphere supervisor cluster! Before we can do that, let’s get the Kubectl CLI and the vSphere plugin package. Open the CLI tools link at here:
Follow the onscreen instructions to download and install the vSphere Kubectl CLI toolkit onto your management host (I’m using a CentOS7 VM).
Time to log into our superviosr K8s cluster! — remember to use the control plane VIP (192.168.100.129) as noted before.
To deploy the guestbook app, we’ll leverage the dynamic persistent volume provisioning capability of the vSphere CSI driver by calling the vSAN storage class “pacific-gold-storage-policy”
apply the PVCs yamls for both the redis master and slave Pods
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl apply -f guestbook/guestbook-master-claim.yaml
persistentvolumeclaim/redis-master-claim created
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl apply -f guestbook/guestbook-slave-claim.yaml
persistentvolumeclaim/redis-slave-claim created
verify both PVCs are showing “Bound” status mapped to two dynamically provisioned persistent volumes (PVs)
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl get pvc
NAME STATUS VOLUME CAPACITY ACCESS MODES STORAGECLASS AGE
redis-master-claim Bound pvc-0102e725-41ad-440b-8a02-8af4d4768ebb 2Gi RWO pacific-gold-storage-policy 14m
redis-slave-claim Bound pvc-fb4b7bbe-9b35-40e8-b251-8f2effe85a2d 2Gi RWO pacific-gold-storage-policy 13m
Now deploy the guestbook app.
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl apply -f guestbook/guestbook-all-in-one.yaml
service/redis-master created
deployment.apps/redis-master created
service/redis-slave created
deployment.apps/redis-slave created
service/frontend created
deployment.apps/frontend created
retrieve the Load Balancer service IP — note NSX has allocated an IP from the /27 Ingress CIDR block
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl get svc -n guestbook
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
frontend LoadBalancer 10.32.0.209 192.168.100.130 80:32610/TCP 4m15s
redis-master ClusterIP 10.32.0.34 <none> 6379/TCP 4m22s
redis-slave ClusterIP 10.32.0.197 <none> 6379/TCP 4m21s
Hit the load balancer IP in browser to test the guestbook app. Enter and submit some messages, and try to destroy and redeploy the app, your data will be kept by the redis PVs.
Step-4: Deploy a TKG cluster
Before we can deploy a TKG cluster, we’ll need to create a content library subscription by pointing to https://wp-content.vmware.com/v2/latest/lib.json, which contains the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes images:
wait for about 5~10 mins for the library to fully sync, at this point of time I can see two versions of Tanzu K8s images:
Next, create a new namespace called “dev01” which will be hosting our new TKG cluster.
Back to the CLI, we’ll switch context from “guestbook” to the new “dev01” namespace:
let’s examine the two TKG K8s versions available from the library:
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl get virtualmachineimages
NAME AGE
ob-15957779-photon-3-k8s-v1.16.8---vmware.1-tkg.3.60d2ffd 9m44s
ob-16466772-photon-3-k8s-v1.17.7---vmware.1-tkg.1.154236c 9m44s
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl get virtualmachineclasses
NAME AGE
best-effort-large 4h48m
best-effort-medium 4h48m
best-effort-small 4h48m
best-effort-xlarge 4h48m
best-effort-xsmall 4h48m
guaranteed-large 4h48m
guaranteed-medium 4h48m
guaranteed-small 4h48m
guaranteed-xlarge 4h48m
guaranteed-xsmall 4h48m
so I have prepared the following yaml config for my TKG cluster — I’m using 1x master node and 3x worker nodes, all within the “guaranteed-small” machine classes.
Once you are logged in and switched to the cluster “dev01-tkg-01” namespace, verify that you can see all 4x TKG nodes are in “Ready” status
[root@pacific-ops01 ~]# kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
dev01-tkg-01-control-plane-n9hqx Ready master 22m v1.16.8+vmware.1
dev01-tkg-01-workers-nwmhh-c766c8f77-nnbsj Ready <none> 56s v1.16.8+vmware.1
dev01-tkg-01-workers-nwmhh-c766c8f77-pcv65 Ready <none> 61s v1.16.8+vmware.1
dev01-tkg-01-workers-nwmhh-c766c8f77-zqfwj Ready <none> 85s v1.16.8+vmware.1
We are now ready to deploy demo apps into the TKG cluster. First, update the cluster RBAC and Pod Security Policies by applying the supplied yaml config.
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl apply -f allow-nonroot-clusterrole.yaml
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/psp:privileged created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/all:psp:privileged created
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl apply -f yelb/yelb-lb.yaml
service/redis-server created
service/yelb-db created
service/yelb-appserver created
service/yelb-ui created
deployment.apps/yelb-ui created
deployment.apps/redis-server created
deployment.apps/yelb-db created
deployment.apps/yelb-appserver created
wait for all the Pods up and running, then retrieve the external IP of the yelb-ui Load Balancer (assigned by NSX from the pre-provisioned /27 Ingress CIDR block)
[root@pacific-ops01 vs7-k8s]# kubectl get svc yelb-ui -n yelb-app
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
yelb-ui LoadBalancer 10.40.19.40 192.168.100.132 80:30116/TCP 9d
Go to the LB IP and you’ll see the app is running successfully.
vSphere Environment Overview
Below is a quick overview of the vSphere Lab environment after you have completed all the steps. You should see a supervisor cluster (consists of 3x ESXi worker nodes and the 3x control VMs), a TKG cluster with its own namespace, and a guestbook microservice app deployed with native vSphere Pod services by leveraging vSAN CSI.
and here is the network topology overview captured from NSX-T UI. Note NSX automatically deploys a dedicated Tier-1 gateway for every TKG cluster created. The tier-1 gateway also provides egress SNAT and Ingress LB capabilities for the TKG cluster.
Route179 