Reducing Harbor Deployment Complexity on Kubernetes

Deploying Harbor on Kubernetes using Helm Prerequisites Step 1: Download Harbor Deployment Manifests Step 2: Configure values. yaml Step 3: Deploy Harbor Step 4: Verify Harbor Installation Leveraging VKS Standard Packages for Harbor setup Prerequisites: Step 1: Associate a VKS Standard Package Repository Step 2: Deploy Prerequisites (For Production-Ready Harbor) Step 3: Deploy Harbor Step 4: Verify Harbor Installation Deploying Harbor as a Supervisor Service in VCF 9 Prerequisites Step 1: Download and Update the Harbor Supervisor Service YAML Step 2: Deploy the Harbor Supervisor Service Step 3: Monitor the Harbor Supervisor Service Deployment Conclusion Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Harbor: Your Enterprise-Ready Container Registry for a Modern Private Cloud VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 75 - Breaking the GitOps Barrier: Continuous Delivery for Modern Apps with VCF 9 What’s Next for Cloud Native: Highlights from KubeCon North America 2025 Harbor is an indispensable open-source container image registry, offering robust features like policy-driven security, role-based access control (RBAC), vulnerability scanning, image signing, image replication and distribution. Deploying Harbor is a common and critical step for organizations looking to streamline their containerization workflows. As we discussed in our previous blog post , Harbor offers significant value through its comprehensive features and can be deployed on a virtual machine (VM). This blog post will pick up where we left off, guiding you through the process of deploying Harbor on an upstream conformant Kubernetes platform using VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) as an example first via Helm, then via VKS standard packages, and finally showcasing the simplified deployment as a supervisor service in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9. This progression highlights how complexity is progressively reduced at each level. If you are interested to learn more about Harbor and how to deploy it on a VM, check out our previous blog. Before diving into the specifics of VKS, let’s briefly outline the general steps for deploying the bare-minimum components of Harbor on any standard Kubernetes cluster (non production-ready). This foundational understanding will help you grasp the components involved. A running Kubernetes cluster (We will use VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) for this, however the process remains the same for any upstream conformant Kubernetes platform). Additionally, configure kubectl to interact with your cluster. kubectl Helm (recommended) for simplified deployment.