The Supervisor Cluster is the management plane for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service. The tenancy model is enforced using a vSphere Namespace where Tanzu Kubernetes clusters reside.
Supervisor Cluster
The Supervisor Cluster provides the management layer on which Tanzu Kubernetes clusters are built. The Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service is a custom controller manager with a set of controllers that is part of the Supervisor Cluster. The purpose of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service is to provision Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.
While there is a one-to-one relationship between the Supervisor Cluster and the vSphere cluster, there is a one-to-many relationship between the Supervisor Cluster and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. You can provision multiple Tanzu Kubernetes clusters within a single Supervisor Cluster. The workload management functionality provided by the Supervisor Cluster gives you control over the cluster configuration and lifecycle, while allowing you to maintain concurrency with upstream Kubernetes.
For more information, see Configuring and Managing a Supervisor Cluster.
vSphere Namespace
You deploy one or more Tanzu Kubernetes clusters to a vSphere Namespace. Resource quotas and storage policy are applied to a vSphere Namespace and inherited by the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed there.
When you provision a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, a resource pool and VM folder are created in the vSphere Namespace. The Tanzu Kubernetes cluster control plane and worker node VMs are placed within this resource pool and VM folder. Using the vSphere Client, you can view this hierarchy by selecting the Hosts and Clusters perspective, and also by selecting the VMs and Templates view.
For more information, see Configuring and Managing vSphere Namespaces.
Content Library
A vSphere Content Library provides the virtual machine template used to create the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster nodes. For each Supervisor Cluster where you intend to deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, you must define a Subscribed Content Library object that sources the OVA used by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service to build cluster nodes. The same Subscribed Content Library can be configured for multiple Supervisor Clusters. There is no relationship between the Subscribed Content Library and the vSphere Namespace. The Subscribed Content Library downloads the latest templates directly from VMware. You upload the OVA templates you want to use to a Local Content Library.
For more information, see Creating and Managing Content Libraries for Tanzu Kubernetes releases.
