Learn what are the differences between deploying a Supervisor on three vSphere clusters mapped to vSphere zones, and a single-cluster deployment of the Supervisor that maps to one vSphere Zone.

Note: Once you deploy a Supervisor on single vSphere cluster, which will result in creating one vSphere Zone, you cannot expand the Supervisor to a three-zone deployment. You can either deploy a Supervisor on one vSphere Zone (single-cluster deployment) or on three vSphere Zones.

Three-Zone Deployment of the Supervisor for Cluster-Level HA

You can enable vSphere IaaS control plane on three vSphere clusters that are mapped to three vSphere Zones. You configure each vSphere cluster as an independent failure domain and map it to one vSphere zone. In a three-zone deployment, all three vSphere clusters become one Supervisor. In a three-zone deployment, you can:

  • Provide cluster-level high-availability to the Supervisor as each vSphere cluster is an independent failure domain.
  • Distribute the nodes of your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters across all three vSphere zones, thus providing HA for your Kubernetes workloads at a vSphere cluster level.
  • Scale the Supervisor by adding hosts to each of the three vSphere clusters.
You can run workloads on a three-zone Supervisor by using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, vSphere Pods and VMs.
Figure 1. Three-Zone Supervisor Deployment

The diagram shows a Supervisor deployed on three vSphere Zones, with vSphere Namespace spanning across all three zone.

Placement of vSphere Zones Across Physical Sites

You can distribute vSphere zones across different physical sites as long as the latency between the sites doesn't exceed 100 ms. For example, you can distribute the vSphere zones across two physical sites - one vSphere zone on the first site, and two vSphere zones on the second site.

Single-Cluster Deployment of the Supervisor

You can still enable a Supervisor on a single vSphere cluster. In this case a single zone is created for the Supervisor automatically or you can use a zone that you created in advance. In a single-cluster deployment, you still have cluster-level high-availability through vSphere HA, and you can only scale your vSphere IaaS control plane setup by adding hosts to the vSphere cluster that maps to the Supervisor. In a single-cluster deployment, you can run workloads through vSphere Pods, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, and VMs deployed through the VM service.
Figure 2. Single-cluster Supervisor deployment

The diagram shows a Supervisor running on one vSphere Zone that maps to one vSphere cluster.