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