How to Configure and Manage a Supervisor

You use the Clusters service to enable and disable a Supervisor, or edit the configuration of an existing Supervisor. The Clusters service is provided within the namespace_management package.

You can enable a vSphere cluster to manage Kubernetes workload objects, only after you enable vSphere DRS in a fully automated mode and enable HA on the cluster.

Before you enable a vSphere IaaS control plane on a vSphere cluster, you must prepare your environment to meet the specific networking, storage, and infrastructure requirements. See the Installing and Configuring vSphere IaaS Control Plane documentation.

For more information about how to configure the storage settings to meet the requirements of vSphere IaaS control plane, see Creating Storage Policies for vSphere IaaS control plane.

For more information about how to configure the networking settings for Supervisors that are configured with the VMware NSX-T™ Data Center as the networking stack, see Configuring NSX for vSphere IaaS control plane.

Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 1, you can enable a Supervisor with vSphere networking or NSX-T Data Center, to provide connectivity between control planes, services, and workloads. A Supervisor that is configured with vSphere networking uses a vSphere Distributed Switch to provide connectivity to Kubernetes workloads and control planes. The cluster also requires a third-party load balancer that provides connectivity to DevOps users and external services. You can install in your vSphere environment the HAProxy load balancer implementation that VMware provides. See Configuring the vSphere Networking Stack for vSphere IaaS control plane and Installing and Configuring the HAProxy Load Balancer.

Staring with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, if you are using vSphere networking, you can use the VMware NSX^® Advanced Load Balancer™ to support Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. See Using the NSX Advanced Load Balancer with vSphere Networking.