Steps For Manual Installation of Tanzu CLI VKS Plugins in Air-Gapped Environments for vSphere Kubernetes(VKS) Version 3.1.0 and Above

Products

• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service

Issue/Introduction

Users operating in an air-gapped environment need to manually download, transfer, and install vSphere Kubernetes (VKS) plugins for the Tanzu CLI.

Environment

VKS 3.4.1 airgapped environments 
vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3

Cause

vSphere Kubernetes (VKS) 3.1.0 has transitioned to an asynchronous download model, and as a result automatic pushing of plugin groups fofr the Supervisor for Tanzu CLI VKS plugins have been deprecated.

Resolution

1. Identify the Required Plugin Version which must match the corresponding VKS release version.

2. Download the Plugin Bundle by running the tanzu plugin download-bundle command below and specify each required plugin with its version and target scope.
Note: For VKS plugins, plugin versions must match the corresponding VKS version. The example below uses VKS v3.4.1 — replace the version numbers accordingly for other VKS.

tanzu plugin download-bundle \
  --plugin pinniped-auth@global:v3.4.1,\
           cluster@k8s:v3.4.1,\
           kubernetes-release@k8s:v3.4.1,\
           package@k8s:v3.4.1,\
           secret@k8s:v3.4.1 \
  --output /tmp/FILE-NAME.tar.gz

3. Transfer and install the Tanzu Plugin Bundle .tar.gz file to the air-gapped environment using the below commands:

tanzu plugin upload-bundle --tar /tmp/FILE-NAME.tar.gz --to-repo registry.example.com/tanzu_cli/plugins
tanzu plugin source update default --uri registry.example.com/tanzu_cli/plugins/plugin-inventory:latest
tanzu plugin clean && tanzu plugin list