Step 1: VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition cluster preparation
VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition consists of a variety of components that enable the bootstrapping and management of Kubernetes clusters.
The main components are:
-
Tanzu CLI
A CLI installed on your local machine and then used to operate with clusters on your chosen target platform.
-
Managed clusters
This is the primary deployment model for clusters in the Tanzu ecosystem and is recommended for production scenarios. You can read more about managed clusters in the official Tanzu Community Edition documentation.
-
Unmanaged clusters
Offer a single node, local workstation cluster suitable for a development/test environment. You can read more about unmanaged clusters in the official Tanzu Community Edition documentation.
In this step, the goal is to prepare the installation of the TCE cluster.
Step 1.1: Install Tanzu CLI
Tanzu CLI can be installed on the three major operating systems (Linux, macOS and Windows).
Follow the instructions here to install Tanzu CLI selecting your operating system.
In order to check that Tanzu CLI is properly installed, run this in the command line:
tanzu version
And the output should be similar to this:
version: v0.11.4
buildDate: 2022-05-17
sha: a9b8f3a
Step 1.2: Choose the type of your cluster
As stated at the beginning of this document, Tanzu Community Edition allows to work with two different types of clusters: managed and unmanaged.
To continue the tutorial, you must decide which of the following mutually exclusive options suits your desired outcome:
- Do you want a single node, local workstation cluster suitable for a development/test environment? If so, continue the tutorial by deploying an unmanaged cluster.
or
- Do you want a full-featured, scalable Kubernetes implementation suitable for a development or production environment? If so, continue the tutorial by deploying an managed cluster.
If you want to know more about planning your deployment check out the official TCE documentation.