vSphere Supervisor Terminology
vSphere Supervisor
TerminologyYou must understand the basic terminology in this chapter to be able use the
vSphere Supervisor
automation APIs
effectively.
vSphere Supervisor Basic Terms
vSphere Supervisor
Basic TermsTerm | 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:
|
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. |