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Quick deep dive into vSphere Namespace roles

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Before you can start consuming a vSphere with Tanzu enabled vSphere Cluster, you need to first create and configure a vSphere Namespace. This is a pretty straight forward process (check out this quick video if you are interested). One of the required configuration is to setup up permissions for which user/groups can access and consume the vSphere Namespace using one of the three default roles.


A question was recently raised in the community on the definition of each role since the user was not able to find more details in the official documentation. Here is a quick summary for each role and its functionality:

  • Owner - Can modify and delete vSphere Namespace
  • Can Edit - Can modify vSphere Namespace
  • Can View - Can perform read only operations on vSphere Namespace

Note: I have already shared this feedback with the vSphere with Tanzu Product Manager to help improve our documentation on this topic

There was also a related question on whether these roles mapped into Kubernetes (K8s) layer, which is the Supervisor Cluster in your vSphere with Tanzu enabled vSphere Cluster? This actually got me curious since I am still a novice when it comes to K8s access control (RBAC). I decided to take a closer look and with some trial error, I was able to see how these vSphere Namespace roles, which is a vCenter Server construct maps into the respective K8s constructs within the Supervisor Cluster.

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Quick demo videos of new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

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VMware Cloud with Tanzu services is VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering that incorporates the vSphere with Tanzu technology delivered as a managed service as part of our VMware Cloud service offering. The initial release of Tanzu services is currently available on VMware Cloud on AWS, which will require SDDC version 1.16 and a request for enablement (contact your VMware account team) prior to deploying a new SDDC and enabling Tanzu services.

Note: In future, Tanzu services will also be enabled for existing SDDC (brownfield) as well as for other VMware Cloud Infrastructure Services, stay tuned!

Using Tanzu services with VMware Cloud is literally night and day when compared to installing and configuring vSphere with Tanzu yourself, which includes a number of other components to setup! As you would expect, as a service, it is simply a click of a button or API call and users only have to provide four basic input (technically three if you leave one of the recommended defaults) 🙂


Rather than talk about how the new Tanzu service works and some of the things you can do with the service right now, I figured I would record a few quick demo videos. You can find the Youtube playlist below if you wish to watch them all and I have also included a link to a Github repo for the demo examples that were used. Hope you enjoy!

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Quick Tip - Install kube-vip as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

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As a follow up to my recent blog post on how to install Metallb as a service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), I also wanted to take a look at the other alternative which is using kube-vip. As mentioned in the previous blog post, I also noticed that Scott Rosenberg, an awesome VMware/Tanzu customer who has also been contributing to the community, has been working on some really cool ways of deploying additional packages using the Carvel tooling.

Since I have not deployed kube-vip for use with service load balancer, I was curious on how easy it would be to setup and hint, it is pretty darn easy using Carvel packages! You can find the detailed instructions along with a sample kubernetes (k8s) application to verify load balancer configuration was setup correctly.

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