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You are here: Home / VMware Tanzu / Minimum vSphere edition & features for Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

Minimum vSphere edition & features for Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

10.13.2021 by William Lam // 7 Comments

There have been a number of questions that have been raised by the community regarding the specific vSphere features and/or editions that is needed to deploy Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). I honestly thought I knew the requirements quite well myself but when it came to specific vSphere Editions, it made me second guess on what features TCE actually required for functionality.

I decided to deploy a brand new setup using the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 (vCenter Server and ESXi) release, which was all deployed onto a single 11th Gen Intel NUC. Below are my findings which I will share back with TCE folks and enhance our documentation. Ultimately, you just need access to a vCenter Server that is managing an ESXi host which can be a standalone host or one that is within a vSphere Cluster. Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone that wishes to get started.

vSphere Version:

  • As the official TCE documentation states, vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or newer is needed and this is primarily because that is the initial release that incorporates our vSphere CSI driver

vSphere Edition (minimum):

  • vCenter Standard and vSphere Standard
  • vCenter Essentials and vSphere Essentials Plus

Note: I did not have access to a vSphere Essential license but I am pretty confident it should also work.

vSphere Features:

  • Both vSphere HA and DRS is NOT required

More from my site

  • vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Community Edition
  • Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • Hybrid (x86 and Arm) Kubernetes clusters using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • Quick Tip - Install kube-vip as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)
  • Quick Tip - Install Metallb as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

Categories // VMware Tanzu, vSphere 6.7, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Tanzu Community Edition

Comments

  1. yang lu says

    10/17/2021 at 6:25 pm

    What is minimum vSphere edition & features for TKGm?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/18/2021 at 5:51 am

      For basic functionality, it would be the same

      Reply
      • yanglu says

        10/18/2021 at 6:21 am

        vSphere Standard is support ?

        Reply
  2. Kisung Yi says

    10/18/2021 at 1:45 am

    Hi William, Can vSphere standard with Tanzu edition can be sold and used for production purpose? As far as i know, vSphere Enterprise version is mandatory not only for tkgs but tkgm. thank you.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/18/2021 at 5:53 am

      Your VMware Account team would be the best folks to help answer specific licensing and SKU purchases based on your needs

      Reply
  3. BierTrinker says

    10/18/2021 at 2:56 am

    Considering that the aim of Tanzu community is to bring people onto the platform, it's a big oversight in my opinion when the free Tanzu requires a $600 ESXi Essentials license (or even a ESXi Standard license, which is even more expensive). I have to question why there is no support for Tanzu Community Edition on ESXi free?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/18/2021 at 5:57 am

      Thanks for the feedback. It would be great if you can also share this on the TCE Github as an issue if you feel strongly about this. As alternative, customers can also use the CAPD provider, which is completely free. If you want to use vSphere and ESXi, there's also VMUG Advantage route ($200 USD) for non-prod usage and you get many other products/features for that price

      Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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