A Supervisor Cluster can either use the vSphere networking stack or VMware NSX-T™ Data Center to provide connectivity to Kubernetes control plane VMs, services, and workloads. The networking used for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service is a combination of the fabric that underlies the vSphere with Tanzu infrastructure and open-source software that provides networking for cluster pods, services, and ingress.
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Supervisor Cluster Networking vSphere with Tanzu environment, a Supervisor Cluster can either use the vSphere networking stack or VMware NSX® to provide connectivity to Kubernetes control plane VMs, services, and workloads. When a Supervisor Cluster is configured with the vSphere networking stack, all hosts from the cluster are connected to a vSphere Distributed Switch that provides connectivity to Kubernetes workloads and control plane VMs. A Supervisor Cluster that uses the vSphere networking stack requires a load balancer on the vCenter Server management network to provide connectivity to DevOps users and external services. A Supervisor Cluster that is configured with VMware NSX® , uses the software-based networks of the solution as well as an NSX Edge load balancer to provide connectivity to external services and DevOps users. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service Cluster Networking Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service cluster provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service supports two CNI options: Antrea (default) and Calico. Both are open-source software that provide networking for cluster pods, services, and ingress.Configuring NSX for vSphere with Tanzu vSphere with Tanzu requires specific networking configuration to enable connectivity to the Supervisor Clusters , vSphere Namespaces , and all objects that run inside the namespaces, such as vSphere Pods , VMs, and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. As a vSphere administrator, install and configure NSX for vSphere with Tanzu . Configuring vSphere Networking and NSX Advanced Load Balancer for vSphere with Tanzu 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 .Configuring vSphere Networking and HAProxy Load Balancer for vSphere with Tanzu vSphere with Tanzu environment, you can install and configure the open source HAProxy load balancer. VMware provides an implementation of HAProxy that you can deploy from an OVA file.
