vSphere with Tanzu supports the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, also known as Avi Load Balancer, Enterprise Edition. You can install and configure the NSX Advanced Load Balancer 22.1.X in your vSphere with Tanzu environment only if you are using vSphere Distributed Switch networking for the Supervisor Cluster .
How the Load Balancer Works with Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters
The NSX Advanced Load Balancer provides dynamically scaling load balancing endpoints for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service. You install and configure the Avi Controller VM. Once you have configured the Controller, it automatically provisions load balancing endpoints for you. For example, when you provision a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, the Controller creates a virtual service and deploys a Service Engine VM to host that service. This virtual service provides load balancing for the Kubernetes control plane.
When you create a Kubernetes service of type load balancer for that cluster, the Controller automatically creates a virtual service and deploys it to the Service Engine. The first Service Engine is created only after the first virtual service is configured. Any subsequent virtual services that are configured use the existing Service Engine. You can deploy multiple virtual services on a Service Engine VM.
Supervisor Cluster with vSphere Networking and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Workflow
This diagram shows the workflow for configuring vSphere Networking and NSX Advanced Load Balancer for vSphere with Tanzu.
