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You are here: Home / VMware Tanzu / Can I deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu on same vSphere Cluster?

Can I deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu on same vSphere Cluster?

06.09.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A simple question with a simple answer, yes! I have seen this question get asked in various internal Slack channels on whether you can deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu (formally Project Pacific) on the same vSphere Cluster? If you were an early user of TKG, you may recall that if you attempted to deploy TKG to a vSphere Cluster which already had vSphere with Tanzu enabled, it would prevent you from proceeding. Instead of having to deploy another Kubernetes management control plane, you could simply leverage and connect to the Supervisor Cluster control plane using the TKG CLI and start deploying TKG Workload Clusters.

From a technical standpoint, there is no reason that TKG and vSphere with Tanzu could not co-exist on the same vSphere Cluster. In fact, this request has come up a number of times that the original TKG behavior has been recently updated to now allow for this co-existence. From an exploratory and learning point of view, this is quite useful to be able to try out both solution and not have to dedicate a specific vSphere Cluster for each of the Tanzu Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. A more practical use case that came up recently from a customer was being able to use both solution as a way to consolidate their workloads using a specific Tanzu K8s solution, which makes total sense. Today, there are still some differences in terms of the features and capabilities between TKG and vSphere with Tanzu and depending on your needs, you may have a use case for both in your environment.

TKG will continue to check if a vSphere Cluster has vSphere with Tanzu enabled and provide a message like the one shown below and then prompt the user on whether they wish to proceed with deploying TKG. For vSphere with Tanzu, there is no checks on whether a vSphere Cluster has TKG deployed or not.


Using my recently released TKG Demo Appliance 1.3.1 Fling, which is a super easy way to get started with TKG, I was able to deploy a TKG Management Cluster to my existing vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment which also has vSphere with Tanzu enabled.


If you wish to disable the message prompt shown earlier, especially for automation purposes, you can add the following two variables and values within the YAML input file:

DEPLOY_TKG_ON_VSPHERE7: true
ENABLE_TKGS_ON_VSPHERE7: false

Lastly, if you are interested in just connecting the TKG CLI to your vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and deploy TKG Workload Cluster, you can follow the official documentation for more details.

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Correctly naming TKR's in Local Content Library for vSphere with Tanzu in vSphere 8
  • vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service
  • How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?
  • Using Terraform to deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu 
  • How to SSH to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu?

Categories // VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere Kubernetes Service

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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