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.