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With all prerequisites completed including the NSX Load Balancer installation, users can configure Tanzu.
vSphere with Tanzu is not truly enabled until a Supervisor Cluster is installed. The Supervisor Cluster is at the heart of Tanzu, providing the necessary resources for the environment. A Supervisor Cluster is created with the Workload Management screen of the vSphere Client. It is associated directly with a cluster within vSphere which has at least two ESXi hosts. The Supervisor Cluster, once created, enables the user to run Kubernetes workloads. VMware portrays the architecture in the following simple diagram in Figure 53.
ESXi houses additional components for Tanzu, as detailed in Figure 54. There is a Spherelet which is a kubelet that is ported to ESXi, which enables the host to be part of a Kubernetes cluster. Three Kubernetes control planes are also present in total, even if there are only two ESXi hosts that make up a Kubernetes cluster. The CRX, or Container Runtime Executive, is for vSphere Pods. Finally, not listed here are the essential two modules which makes Kubernetes cluster provisioning possible: The Cluster API and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service.
Note: Spherelets and the vSphere Pods are not supported with vSphere Networking as used in this guide.
Finally, VMware has three different ways that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid helps the user to manage the environment. At a high level, these methods are:
These components are displayed in Figure 55.