vSphere with Tanzu Components and Services

Before you can automate some of the administrative tasks for using vSphere with Tanzu, you must first familiarize yourself with the high-level system architecture and components involved.

The vSphere with Tanzu API consists of two packages, namespace_management and namespaces. In the namespace_management package, you can find APIs for enabling and disabling a vSphere cluster with vSphere with Tanzu, configuring the network and storage policies of the Supervisor Cluster, upgrading a cluster to the desired version of vSphere with Tanzu, and so on. In the namespaces package, you can find APIs for creating, configuring, and deleting a Supervisor Namespace, and also for setting the necessary permissions for accessing the namespace.

Figure 1. Services and Components Involved in Using vSphere with Tanzu

The components and services of vSphere with Tanzu interconnect with the components of your vCenter Server environment.

The vSphere Kubernetes Services component runs on vCenter Server and communicates the vSphere admin requests to the Supervisor Cluster control plane. The component comprises of several vSphere Automation services which you can use to enable vSphere with Tanzu on a vSphere cluster and create Kubernetes workloads.

You can use the Cluster Compatibility service to query a vCenter Server instance about the available clusters that meet the requirements for enabling vSphere with Tanzu.

You can use the Clusters service to enable or disable vSphere with Tanzu on a cluster. You can also reconfigure the settings of a Supervisor Cluster.

You can use the Instances service to create, edit, and delete a Supervisor Namespace from a Supervisor Cluster. You can also change all or some of the settings of an existing namespace.

Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 1, a Supervisor Cluster backed by a vSphere Distributed Switch uses the HAProxy load balancer to provide connectivity to DevOps and external service. The Load Balancer service represents the user provisioned load balancers.