Virtual Machines in vSphere IaaS control plane

vSphere IaaS control plane offers the VM Service functionality to enable DevOps engineers to provision and manage VMs on a namespace in a self-service manner. You use the vSphere IaaS control plane automation APIs to create VM classes that specify the deployment policy and resource reservations of such VMs.

Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2a, DevOps engineers can use the VM Service functionality to deploy and run VMs on a namespace through the kubectl commands. You can use the vSphere IaaS control plane automation APIs to manage the two VM Service components: VM classes and content libraries. For more information about managing content libraries in the context of vSphere IaaS control plane, see Content Libraries in vSphere IaaS control plane.

You can use the automation APIs to create and manage VM classes. A VM class specification defines the number of CPUs, memory capacity, and resource reservation settings of the desired virtual machine. vSphere IaaS control plane currently offers twelve ready-to-use VM classes (T-shirt sizes) that are derived from the most popular VMs in Kubernetes. Based on the resource reservation that a VM specification requests, each predefined VM class has two editions: guaranteed and best effort. The guaranteed VM class fully reserves the configured resources. A best effort VM class does not guarantee any resource reservations and allows their overcommitment.

You associate a VM class with a specific namespace to make it available to the DevOps engineers who have access to that namespace. You can assign any number of existing VM classes or create a custom one. Note that VMs deployed by the DevOps engineers through the VM Service can only be managed with the kubectl commands. A VM provisioned by DevOps engineers shares the same resources in a namespace as containers.

Use the VirtualMachineClasses interface to create and manage a specification of a VM class object. Through these objects you predefine the number of CPUs, memory capacity, and reservation settings. See Create a VM Class in vSphere IaaS control plane. To make a VM class available to the DevOps engineers for self-service VM deployment, you must associate it with a specific namespace. See Associating a VM Class with a vSphere Namespace.