vSphere with Tanzu Terminology
You must understand the basic terminology in this chapter to be able use the vSphere with Tanzu APIs effectively.
vSphere with Tanzu Basic Terms
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Supervisor Cluster | A vSphere cluster that has the vSphere with Tanzu enabled. |
| Tanzu Kubernetes cluster | An upstream Kubernetes cluster provisioned and managed by using the VMware Tanzu™ Kubernetes Grid™ Service. A Tanzu Kubernetes resides in a Supervisor Namespace. You can deploy workloads and services to such clusters in the same way as you do with standard Supervisor Cluster. |
| Supervisor Namespace | A namespace that is created within a Supervisor Cluster. Each namespace sets the resource boundaries for CPU, memory, storage, and also the number of Kubernetes objects that can run within the namespace. After a namespace is configured, you can run Kubernetes workloads within the namespace. |
| vSphere Pod | A virtual machine with a small footprint that runs one or more Linux containers. A vSphere Pod is equivalent to a Kubernetes pod. vSphere Pods are compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and can run OCI compatible containers regardless the operating system. |
| Spherelet | A spherelet is an implementation of the kubelet functionality ported natively on each host in the Supervisor Cluster. |
| Kubernetes Workload | Workloads are applications that consist of containers running inside vSphere Pods or inside the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. |
| Supervisor Cluster control plane | vSphere with Tanzu creates a Kubernetes control plane directly on the hypervisor layer. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the vSphere Pods in the Supervisor Cluster. |
| Supervisor Cluster worker nodes | ESXi hosts that are part of a Supervisor Cluster are considered as worker nodes. You run your Kubernetes workloads on the worker nodes. |
| Container Runtime Executive (CRX) | CRX is an isolated Linux execution environment similar to a VM that works together with ESXi. |