vSphere IaaS control plane Documentation

vSphere IaaS control plane (formerly known as vSphere with Tanzu) is a platform for running containerized applications in vSphere. vSphere administrators enable vSphere IaaS control plane on vSphere clusters to create a developer-ready platform where DevOps engineers and application developers can run Kubernetes applications in a self-service manner.

vSphere clusters enabled with vSphere IaaS control plane are called Supervisors. vSphere administrators can create namespaces on the Supervisor, called vSphere Namespaces, and configure them with a certain amount of memory, CPU, and storage. DevOps engineers and application developers can then run Kubernetes containers within the vSphere Namespaces by deploying vSphere Pods, VMs, or by creating upstream Kubernetes clusters through VMware Tanzu™ Kubernetes Grid™ and run your applications inside these clusters.

Learn About the vSphere IaaS control plane Features

Before you turn vSphere into a platform for running containerized workloads:

Learn what vSphere IaaS control plane is and what are the supported workloads that you can run on the platform.
Get familiar with the architecture and components of the Supervisor and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters.
Learn what are the different deployments that you can implement for the Supervisor.
Check out the system requirements for zonal deployment of the Supervisor and well as for the single-cluster deployment of the Supervisor.

Once you understand how vSphere IaaS control plane functions, learn how to install and configure your first Supervisor. The next step is to deploy workloads on the Supervisor:

Learn how to provision and manage upstream Kubernetes clusters by using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere.
Checkout how to deploy Kubernetes containers directly on the Supervisor through vSphere Pods.
Get familiar with deploying VMs on the Supervisor.

To keep your vSphere IaaS control plane environment up to date, backup and restore, and troubleshoot, learn how to maintain vSphere IaaS control plane.

Learn More About vSphere IaaS control plane

Learn more about vSphere IaaS control plane from the following resources:

Learn about vSphere IaaS control plane from the vSphere IaaS control plane product page.
Ask questions about vSphere IaaS control plane in the vSphere community forum.
Explore vSphere IaaS control plane without having to install it using the vSphere IaaS control plane hands-on lab.
Checkout the technical content that covers different aspects of vSphere IaaS control plane, from the latest features to deep-dive technical articles on the vSphere IaaS control plane Tech Zone.
Explore the articles about vSphere IaaS control plane on the William Lam blog. William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working at VMware. The blog focuses on automation, integration, and operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).

Use the vSphere IaaS control plane Documentation

The vSphere IaaS control plane documentation reflects the latest changes in the vSphere IaaS control plane platform that are delivered with the vSphere releases. For example, version 8.0 contains all the updates for 8.0.x releases. All our documentation comes in PDF format, which you can access by selecting the Download PDF icon on any page in the HTML documentation. PDFs for previous releases of vSphere IaaS control plane are available for download in a ZIP archive format. The archive can be found under the vSphere IaaS control plane Documentation Archive heading for each major version in the table of contents on the left.

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