vSphere Supervisor
Terminology

You must understand the basic terminology in this chapter to be able use the
vSphere Supervisor
automation APIs effectively.

vSphere Supervisor
Basic Terms

Term
Description
Supervisor
A vSphere cluster that has the
vSphere Supervisor
enabled.
TKG
cluster
An upstream Kubernetes cluster provisioned and managed by using the
TKG
. A
TKG
resides in a
vSphere Namespace
. You can deploy workloads and services to such clusters in the same way as you do with standard
Supervisor
.
vSphere Namespace
A namespace that is created within a
Supervisor
. Each namespace sets the resource boundaries for CPU, memory, storage, and also the number of Kubernetes objects that can run within the namespace. After a namespace is configured, you can run Kubernetes workloads within the namespace.
vSphere Pod
A virtual machine with a small footprint that runs one or more Linux containers. A
vSphere Pod
is equivalent to a Kubernetes pod.
vSphere Pod
s are compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and can run OCI compatible containers regardless the operating system.
Spherelet
A spherelet is an implementation of the kubelet functionality ported natively on each host in the
Supervisor
.
Kubernetes Workload
Workloads are applications that are deployed in one of the following ways:
  • As containers running inside
    vSphere Pod
    s.
  • Workloads provisioned through the VM service.
  • TKG
    clusters deployed by using the
    TKG
    .
  • Applications running inside the
    TKG
    clusters.
Supervisor
control plane
vSphere Supervisor
creates a Kubernetes control plane directly on the hypervisor layer. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the
vSphere Pod
s in the
Supervisor
.
Supervisor
worker nodes
ESXi
hosts that are part of a
Supervisor
are considered as worker nodes. You run your Kubernetes workloads on the worker nodes.
Container Runtime Executive (CRX)
CRX is an isolated Linux execution environment similar to a VM that works together with
ESXi
.
VM Service
The VM Service functionality allows DevOps engineers to deploy and manage virtual machines in their Kubernetes environment through standard Kubernetes APIs. vSphere administrators are responsible for providing VM Classes and VM Images for the DevOps engineers to choose from, as well as managing resource allocations to self-service provisioned VMs.
Self-Service Namespace
vSphere administrators can activate the Self-Service Namespace service on a
Supervisor
and create namespace templates for DevOps engineers to create a
vSphere Namespace
themselves.
vSphere Zones
vSphere Zones
provide high availability against clusters-level failures to workloads deployed on
vSphere Supervisor
. You can configure a three-zone
Supervisor
mapped to three vSphere clusters or a one-zone
Supervisor
mapped to a single vSphere cluster. In a single cluster deployment, the high availability is provided by vSphere HA and is only on a host level.