Lab Environment

This course material is made up of video lessons and lab guides.

The course was originally written for use with an automatically provisioned, on-demand lab environment hosted by VMware. That environment is, however, no longer available for this course.

The standalone video lessons are not tied to the lab environment and provide general overviews, discussions or demonstrations of elements of Tanzu Application Service. You should watch all of these as part of the course.

The lab guides contain embedded videos, generally a very brief introduction at the start and one or two longer walk-through videos at the end. In the absence of a lab environment, you can use these walk-throughs to obtain a reasonably good understanding of the materials in the course. This is, of course, not a full substitute for being able to do the lab exercises.

If you wish to attempt the labs yourself you should take one of two approaches. Either:

• Ask your VMware account representative to put you in contact with a member of the customer success team who can help you gain access to an appropriate environment, or
• Use a private vSphere and NSX-T Data Center environment over which you have sufficient access and control.

Using Your Own Environment

If you choose to use your own environment there are a few things that you will need to know. The first is the the lab and video materials were mostly updated in around August 2021 and so reflect versions of software current at that time. Other details about specific components are outlined below.

Linux "Jumpbox"

Much of the lab work in the course is done from the command-line of an Linux machine, running Ubuntu 20.04, known as the "jumpbox". In the lab environment the jumpbox had a hostname of sa-ubuntu-01 and the user account used was ubuntu. The precise details of the machine name and account are not important but you will need a similar machine in your environment.

vSphere

The vSphere environment used in the lab environment is now rather old, being version 6.7.0. Newer versions are, of course, supported by Tanzu Application Service.

The resources allocated for the lab were:

• 144 GHz CPU
• 144 GB memory
• 1 TB disk storage

NSX-T Data Center

Again, the NSX-T Data Center version in the lab is old. The interface has changed considerably in more up to date versions,although all the features used are still present. This means that the videos and instructions will not match directly with the newer interface and you will have to find the equivalent functionality.

The main initial setup needed in NSX-T is the existence of a Tier-0 router, an appropriate overlay network and an available IP address range. The details of these appear in the later labs.

Tanzu Application Service

The version of Tanzu Application Service shown in the material was version 2.11, although you may also see references to version 2.10 in places.

The 2.10 series is no longer a generally supported release. The 2.11.40 release (the latest 2.11.x version as of June 2023) is still under support. However version 4.0, which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, is now available and it is the recommended release for new installations.