As they say, new year with new opportunities. 2020 brought many changes in everyday work. I changed roles, not only working with vRealize but with the whole VMware technology, hopefully it will bring many more challenges as well as opportunities.
At the beginning of the year, I managed to achieve 50% of what I wanted, i.e. for me to get a triple VCAP Deploy crown from three different technologies
Pre-req
I decided to start the year with getting to know Tanzu. At the very beginning, to work with this technology, vSphere version 7.x is required, so I built a simple lab based on this version.
1x vCenter
3xESXi
For people who, like me, have older laboratory environments, we need to introduce one minor change into ISO so that we can set up such an environment.
In the BOOT.cfg file in the kernelopt line we add allowLegacyCPU = true which will allow us to install in a laboratory environment with older processors, ESXi version 7
Ok, so we installed the environment, then we need to deploy HAproxy. This can be done using the OVA provided by VMware
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/80735
The setup I made for HAProxy is as follows
Management IP – 192.168.100.132/24
Workload IP – 172.16.1.50/24
Load Balancer IP 172.16.1.208/28
Now we have 90% of pre req completed so we can start work with workload management
Tanzu
On menu click Workload Management or ctrl+alt+7
To configure the environment we need to go through a 9 step wizard
- The first step requires us to choose a specific vCenter with which we will connect and the network. As the environment is set up for Tanzu, I do not have NSX-T there, so we choose a local network
- The second step is to choose a cluster that will be Tanzu compatible
- At the third stage, we set the Controls Plane size, which is nothing but the number of Kubernetes vm’s we can build
- Step four is a Storage
- Now, the fifth step, which is Load Balancer settings.
- Here, in addition to the HAProxy settings, we also need to configure the certificate. The certificate is available in the advanced settings of our HAProxy. However, it is encoded with Base64, we can use any decoder I used https://www.base64decode.org/. You can also connect to HAProxy VM and get certificate from /etc/haproxy/ca.crt
- Next is Management Network for communication between Kubernetes control plane VM and vCenter
- On next step we will only add DNS Server
- For the workload network, select distributed swich with portgroup and enter the range from our workload network
- On TKG Configuration choose Conent Library
- and at the end click Finish for Enabling Workload Management on Tanzu Cluster. Now we need to wait till configuring is in progress
After a few minutes / hours your eyes will see the configured and working workload management, so now the fun begins, but it’s for the next article 
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