Skip to main content
NetApp Solutions

VMware vSphere with Tanzu overview

Contributors kevin-hoke
PDFs

VMware vSphere with Tanzu, also known as vSphere Pods, lets you use the ESXi hypervisor nodes in your VMware vSphere environment as worker nodes in a bare metal Kubernetes environment.

VMware vSphere with Kubernetes

A VMware vSphere with Tanzu environment is enabled under Workload Management just like a native TKGS cluster.

A virtualized Supervisor Cluster is created to provide a highly available control plane for Kubernetes, and individuals Namespaces are created for each application to ensure resource isolation for users.

Supervisor Cluster

When VMware vSphere with Tanzu is enabled, each of the ESXi hosts have the Spherelet application installed and configured. This enables each node to act as a worker in a Kubernetes deployment and manages the pods deployed on each node.

Namespace

Currently, VMware vSphere with Tanzu and vSphere Pods only support the local vSphere CSI driver. This works by having administrators create storage policies in the vSphere client that select from storage targets currently available to be used as vSphere datastores. These policies are used to create persistent volumes for containerized applications.

Note Although there currently is no support for the NetApp Astra Trident CSI driver that allows direct connectivity to external ONTAP and Element storage arrays, these NetApp storage systems are often used to support the primary storage for the vSphere environment, and NetApp advanced data management and storage efficiency tools can be used in this manner.

If you would like to read more about VMware vSphere with Tanzu, see the documentation here.