So, you’re a vSphere admin who wants to have a play with Kubernetes in your on-prem or cloud vSphere environment. Where to get started?

Tanzu Basic is the best way to deploy conformant Kubernetes to vSphere 6.7U3+ environments. Any Enterprise Plus customer running 7.0 U1+ automatically gets a 60 day free trial.

A perfect option for a sandpit environment of Tanzu Basic is William Lam’s Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance, recently updated to version 1.2.1. William has helpfully bundled all the required dependencies in order to fast-track the deployment of TKG clusters on vSphere. His documentation is fantastic, and I’ve personally used this method a number of times to quickly launch a TKG demo.

If you’d rather do it the slightly less easy way, you can setup HA Proxy and TKG yourself. I blogged about this a little while ago, when TKG was on version 1.1. With the release of TKG 1.2.1 I will revisit this process, as well as fleshing out the process a bit more.