Life cycle management design details the decisions for life cycle management of the GPU-enabled ESXi hosts in the VI workload domain and of the vSphere with Tanzu instance.

Table 1. Life Cycle Management for Private AI Ready Infrastructure
VMware Cloud Foundation Component Description
VI workload domain

The GPU-enabled hosts that are part of a VI workload domain in VMware Cloud Foundation must be managed with a vSphere Lifecycle Manager image that includes the right components for the vendor-specific GPU, for example, the NVIDIA host driver and management daemon for ESXi.

vSphere with Tanzu life cycle management You perform life cycle management of vSphere with Tanzu by using the vSphere Client and integrated life cycle management functions available in the kubectl command line tool.
Table 2. Design Decisions on Life Cycle Management for Private AI Ready Infrastructure for VMware Cloud Foundation

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

AIR-TZU-LCM-001

For life cycle management of a GPU-enabled VI workload domain, use a vSphere Lifecycle Manager image with a custom ESXi image that includes the GPU driver and any other core components from the GPU vendor.
  • Eases maintaining the right host driver versions and daemons.
  • Introduces consistency across the GPU-enabled hosts.

You must create the customer vSphere Lifecycle Manager image before you deploy the VI workload domain.

AIR-TZU-LCM-002

Use the vSphere Client for life cycle management of a Supervisor.

Life cycle management of a Supervisor is not integrated in SDDC Manager.

You perform deployment, patching, updates, and upgrades of a Supervisor and its components manually.

AIR-TZU-LCM-003

Use kubectl for life cycle management of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster.

Life cycle management of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster is not integrated in SDDC Manager.

You perform deployment, patching, updates, and upgrades of a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster and its components manually.