Month: March 2023

In a follow up post to how-much-space-does-an-air-gap-installation-of-tanzu-tkg-1-6-0-need I thought it would be useful to expand on the initial summary to include an upgrade to TKG 2.1.1.

In the previous 1.6.0 example there was a total of 157 images (881 artifacts) requiring 9.7GB of storage space. However the download process has been modified and doesn’t use a shell script to download files for an air gap registry anymore, but rather a command such as:

tanzu isolated-cluster download-bundle --source-repo projects.registry.vmware.com/tkg --tkg-version v2.1.1

This results in 244 tar files being downloaded for a single version of TKG and 45GB of space needed.

When these tar files are uploaded I experienced several problems caused by a redis bug when using Harbor 1.10.x, and the upload command only succeeded once I had upgraded to Harbor 2.5.0.

tanzu isolated-cluster upload-bundle --source-directory ./ --destination-repo registry.sbcpureconsult.internal/tkg --ca-certificate /tmp/ca.crt

In total (for the combination of both TKG 1.6.0 and 2.1.1 releases) there are a total of 177 repositories requiring 20.58GB of storage space.

If I subtract the two figures from one another it indicates that TKG 2.1.1 requires 10.88GB in total.

I have implemented several air gapped installations of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6 now using Harbor registry so thought it might be worth recording how many images are stored and the space required.

Short on time? I should caveat that my results only record the space needed for a single version of Kubernetes (1.23.8). This is the newest supported build of Kubernetes in the TLG 1.6.0 release.

During the air gap installation it is possible to reduce the file set required to be stored in your registry by extracting the Bill of Materials for a specific version only:

export DOWNLOAD_TKRS="v1.23.8_vmware.2-tkg.1"

In total (for this specific release) there are 157 images (881 artifacts) requiring 9.7GB of storage space.

I have tested the deployment of a management and worker cluster from the air gap registry and confirm successful installation.

Over time you may accumulate older versions in your registry which are no longer required, however there’s not information available currently on how you could reduce the number of images stored – so I would recommend keeping the image-copy file produced during each iteration of the air gap registry preparation phase so that you could remove them manually at a later date.