Provision a Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu

Use VMware Tanzu Mission Control to provision the necessary resources and create a new Tanzu Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisites

Before you can create new clusters using Tanzu Mission Control, you must first establish a connection with your management cluster.

1. Register your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service Supervisor Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control, as described in Register a Management Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control.
2. Create a provisioner into which you will provision the cluster, as described in Create a Provisioner in Your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster

Make sure you have the appropriate permissions to create a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster.

• To provision a cluster, you must be associated with the clustergroup.edit role on the cluster group in which you want to put the new cluster.
• To see and use a cloud provider account connection for creating a cluster, you must be associated with the organization.credential.view role.
• You must also have admin privileges on the management cluster to provision resources within it.

Log in to the Tanzu Mission Control console, as described in Log In to the Tanzu Mission Control Console.

Procedure

1. In the left navigation pane of the Tanzu Mission Control console, click Clusters.
2. On the Clusters page, click Add Cluster, and then choose Create Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster from the dropdown.
3. Click to select the management cluster in which to create the new workload cluster, and then click Continue to Create Cluster.
4. On the Create cluster page, select the provisioner in which you want to create the cluster, and then click Next.
5. Enter the name, group, and other details for the cluster.
   1. Enter a name for the cluster.
      Cluster names must be unique within an organization.
   2. Select the cluster group to which you want to attach your cluster.
   3. You can optionally enter a description and apply labels.
   4. Click Next.
6. Select your configuration options.
   1. Select the Kubernetes version to use for the cluster.
      The latest supported version is preselected for you.
   2. You can optionally define an alternative CIDR for the pod and service.
      The Pod CIDR and Service CIDR cannot be changed after the cluster is created.
   3. You can optionally select the default storage class for the cluster and allowed storage classes.
      The list of storage classes that you can choose from is taken from your vSphere namespace.
   4. Click Next.
7. Select the type of cluster you want to create.
   The primary difference between the two is that the highly available cluster is deployed with multiple control plane nodes.
   1. Choose the cluster type.
   2. You can optionally select a different instance type for the cluster's control plane node and its storage class.
      For more information about the instance types available in vSphere with Tanzu, see Virtual Machine Class Types for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters in the vSphere with Tanzu Configuration and Management documentation.
   3. You can optionally configure additional storage volumes for your control plane.
      To configure additional volumes, click Add Volume and then specify the name, mount path, and capacity for the volume. To add another, click Add Volume again.
   4. Click Next.
8. You can optionally define the default node pool and create additional node pools for your cluster.
   1. Specify the number of worker nodes to provision.
   2. Select the instance type for workload clusters.
   3. Select the storage class.
   4. To configure additional storage volumes for your node pool, click Add Volume.
   5. To provide labels for the nodes and cloud, enter the label and then click Add Label.
   For more information about node pools, see Create a Node Pool
9. When you ready to provision the new cluster, click Create Cluster.

Results

When you click Create Cluster, you are directed the cluster detail page where you can see its status is Unknown while it is being created. Tanzu Mission Control provisions the resources necessary for your cluster in your management cluster. It then creates the workload cluster and attaches it to your organization in the cluster group that you specified. This process takes a few minutes.