Learn what are the different licenses that you can assign to the Supervisor and how the license compliance, evaluation period, and license expiration work.
Licensing a Supervisor
After you activate a Supervisor on vSphere clusters, you can use the full set of capabilities of the Supervisor within a 60 day evaluation period. You must assign a valid license to the Supervisor before the 60 day evaluation period expires.
VCF and VVF Solution Licenses
Tanzu Edition Licenses
If you are running vSphere 8 Update 2b and your Supervisor is already licensed with a valid Tanzu edition license, the license continues to work until it expires. Once the Tanzu license expires, you must assign the VCF or VVF Solution License to the Supervisor or a valid Tanzu license.
License Expiration
When a Solution License, or Tanzu edition license expires, you can continue using the full set of capabilities of vSphere IaaS control plane until you procure new licenses. However, you cannot assign the expired license on new Supervisors.
Evaluation Period Expiration
When the evaluation period for a Supervisor expires, as a vSphere administrator you cannot create new vSphere Namespaces or update the Kubernetes version of the Supervisor. As a DevOps engineer, you cannot deploy new workloads and you cannot make changes to the configuration of the existing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters such as adding new nodes.
You can still deploy workloads on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters and all existing workloads continue to run as expected. All Kubernetes workloads that are already deployed continue their normal operation.
License Compliance
A Solution License, or Tanzu license key has per CPU capacity with up to 32 cores per CPU, similarly to the ESXi host licenses. When you assign a one of these licenses to a Supervisor, the amount of capacity consumed is determined by the number of CPUs on the hosts from the clusters and the number of cores in each CPU. You can assign a Solution License, or Tanzu edition license key to multiple Supervisors at a time, but you cannot assign multiple license keys to one Supervisor.
If you expand a Supervisor by adding new hosts for example, and the license key that you have assigned to the Supervisor runs out of capacity, you can continue using the same license key. To remain EULA compliant however, you must procure a new license key with sufficient capacity to cover all the CPUs and cores in the Supervisor.
Licenses for vSphere IaaS control plane
Depending on the networking stack that you have configured the vSphere IaaS control plane with, the provided licenses vary:
| Supervisor Setup | Licenses for vSphere 8 Update 2b | Licenses Before vSphere 8 Update 2b |
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| Supervisor with VDS networking and NSX Advanced Load Balancer |
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| Supervisor with VDS networking and HAProxy load balancer |
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| Supervisor with NSX |
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| Supervisor with NSX and NSX Advanced Load Balancer |
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