TMC introduced a new option for deploying software/packages by integrating software deployment feature in the TMC console. There is a new option now on the console named “Catalog” as shown in the below screenshot.
Once you click on the “Catalog” option, you will see the following softwares available by default.
Note: In case you have not onboarded or selected any cluster from the dropdown, softwares will not be shown and you will see a message like below.
Before I talk about the process of deploying these softwares on a supported Kubernetes cluster, lets understand a few important points here.
- By default, the TKG Standard package repository is added on TMC and hence the softwares you see are nothing but the packages that come with TKG standard.
- We can also create our own carvel package repository, add them on TMC and make the packages available for the installation.
- TMC also supports the deployment of softwares on non TKG Clusters, you can see the full list of supported clusters here “https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tanzu-Mission-Control/services/rn/VMware-Tanzu-Mission-Control-Rel...”
- TKG cluster v1.4 or later is supported
- TMC catalog does not support deployment on the following type of clusters:
- TKG Supervisor cluster
- TKG management cluster
- TKG 1.3 and earlier
Now, let’s move on and understand how to deploy the packages from TMC Catalog.
Installing Software Package from TMC Catalog
In this post, I am having a TKG 1.4 workload cluster running on the vSphere 6.7u3 environment and it is attached to the TMC already.
Pre-requirements
- Ensure the supported TKG version is running as mentioned above
- You have added a package repository. In this case, there is default package repository already available for TKG standard. So skip this for now.
- Ensure the TMC components are running on your TKG cluster as shown below. This is part of onboarding a cluster on the TMC.
Note: If you notice in the above screenshot, there is a new pod named “package-deployment-xxxx”, that is responsible for executing the package installation.
Package Installation
Follow the below steps for installing any available package.
- Go to Catalog option from TMC console
- Select the cluster from the drop down list and then click on the package you want to install. In this case, I will be installing the “cert-manager” package.
- Once you click on the cert-manager package, the following form will be shown.
- Click on the Install Package button
- Enter the package name and select the version.
- Click on the Next button
- There are multiple parameters as shown in the above screenshot. Make the selection as per your package.
- Click on the Next button
- In case there is more customization that your package supports, pass the values accordingly.
- Click on the Install Package button
- As you can see in the above screenshot, package reconciling is in progress. It takes a few mins and you can monitor the status on the cluster and TMC console too. Wait for successful status.
- Look at the status after a few mins and you will see that the package is showing under the installed tab with the successful status.
Note: If you are using TKG 1.3 or earlier version, you might see an error like below in the “package-deployment-xxx” pod log
For more detail, refer VMware documentation here