Supportability of Multiple Harbor Tile Instances in a Single Tanzu Operations Manager Foundation

Products

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition

Issue/Introduction

Customers may inquire about deploying a second or multiple instances of the Harbor Registry Tile within the same Tanzu Operations Manager (Ops Manager) foundation to achieve environment isolation or multiple registry endpoints.

Environment

• VMware Harbor Registry tile

Cause

Tanzu Operations Manager is designed to manage a single instance of the Harbor Registry tile per foundation. Attempting to deploy multiple instances of the same tile type within a single BOSH/Ops Manager environment can lead to:

• Configuration Conflicts: Duplicate BOSH DNS aliases and runtime configurations (e.g., harbor-dns-aliases already added to the instance group).
• Deployment Failures: BOSH task errors during the 'Preparing deployment' phase due to colocated job collisions.
• Supportability Issues: Broadcom GSS does not support configurations where multiple Harbor tiles are managed by the same Ops Manager.

Resolution

Deploying multiple Harbor Tile instances in a single Ops Manager foundation is NOT supported.

To deploy additional Harbor registries within the same environment, the following Broadcom-recommended approaches should be used:

1. Deploy Additional Ops Manager Foundations (Recommended)

For a fully supported architecture, deploy a separate Tanzu Operations Manager and BOSH Director instance (foundation) for each additional Harbor Registry tile. Multiple foundations can coexist within the same vCenter or cloud environment.

2. Harbor via Helm Chart (Self-Managed)

You can deploy Harbor as a containerized application using Helm charts within a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) cluster.

• Pros: Allows for multiple registry instances within a cluster.
• Caveats: This is a self-managed deployment. While Broadcom provides the Helm charts, the operational management (backups, upgrades, and troubleshooting of the Helm-based installation) carries a different level of support compared to the integrated BOSH/Tile-based deployment.

 

Internal Notes

• Standalone Harbor deployments (OVA or manual installs on Ubuntu/Linux) are not supported for integration within the Tanzu Platform environment.

Reference

• Installing and configuring the VMware Harbor Registry tile