Hellooo again!

It’s time to play around with the Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)! I would love to use the Tanzu Platform to run my Containerized Applications in my Lab, however the footprint of real Tanzu Platforms (such as TKGI, TKGS, TKGm) is too high for my humble home lab. I managed to setup all these solutions, however my home lab was screaming when enabling Workload on them.

Hence TCE comes into the picture as a nice playground!

What is TCE?

The TCE Github page provides us with the following information:

Tanzu Community Edition is a fully-featured, easy to manage, Kubernetes platform for learners and users. It is a freely available, community supported, and open source distribution of VMware Tanzu. It can be installed and deployed in minutes to your local workstation or favorite infrastructure provider. Along with cluster management, powered by Cluster API Cluster API, Tanzu Community Edition enables higher-level functionality via its robust package management built on top of Carvel’s kapp–controller, and opinionated, yet extensible, Carvel packages.

Check it out yourself here.
TCE Documentation can be found here.

My Setup?

My Setup looks as follows:

• vCenter 7.0.2
• Intel NUC NUC10i5FNH ESXi 7.0.1 with 8 Logical CPUs & 32 GB RAM
• MacBook Pro (x86; not M1) as Bootstrap Machine
• Latest version of Docker Desktop on your Bootstrap Machine
• Latest version of Kubectl installed on your Bootstrap Machine

Let’s get Started!

If you’re on a Mac and you do not have the ‘Xcode Command Line Tools‘ installed yet, now is a good time to do so. This avoids an error later on in the install process. Just open your Terminal and run:

xcode-select-install

A popup will be shown confirming your install of the ‘Xcode Command Line Tools’.

Installing TCE is very easy, make sure to have your Terminal opened and install it via Homebrew:

brew install vmware-tanzu/tanzu/tanzu-community-edition

In the Output of the ‘brew install’ command, note down the Installation Directory / Location.

If you’re new to Homebrew, follow the instructions here.

Run the Post Installation Configuration Script:

{HOMEBREW-INSTALL-LOCATION-FROM-PREVIOUS-STEP}/v0.9.1/libexec/configure-tce.sh

Confirm that the Tanzu CLI is now functioning by checking the version:

tanzu version

Another way to see if you’ve successfully installed and are using TCE is to simply run the ‘tanzu‘ command and check the output for the ‘standalone-cluster‘ option. This option is currently (at time of writing this blog post) only available in TCE.

tanzu

You are all set! Let’s deploy a simple standalone cluster on vSphere in another blog post!

Looking for other nice TCE Blogs? Check out this blog post from our colleague for an Automated Deployment on AWS with Terraform!

• K8s