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

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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

Integrated NSX-T deployment in vSphere 7.0 Update 3 fails with timeout

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One of the new features highlighted in the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release is the integrated NSX-T deployment and configuration workflow found directly within the vSphere UI as shown in the screenshot below.


After you click on the the "Install NSX" button, it will prompt for the NSX-T OVA and then take users through a guided wizard to on deploying and configuring NSX-T. I noticed that a few users were reporting a timeout issue after running through the workflow:

Cannot complete the operation: See the event log for details. Timeout: The task did not complete within the expected time span

I have not used this plugin before, so I was not sure what the issue was until I came across this Tweet from Validimir Velikov, a vSphere UI Engineer who had worked on the integrated NSX-T plugin and shared the reason for this error. A newer version of NSX-T will be needed to use this feature as the vSphere UI expects a "callback" from NSX-T Manager when the deployment and configuration is complete, which the current released version of NSX-T (3.1.3.1) does not support.

I think we could have provided a better user experience by first checking the NSX-T OVA version and ensuring that it meets the minimum version that supports this capability. Hopefully this is something we can improve upon in the future.

How to programmatically retrieve vCenter Server Patch & Update History?

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release, I was just looking at the "History" tab within the Virtual Machine Management Interface (VAMI), which gives you a historical view of all the patches and updates that have been applied to your vCenter Server since its initial deployment. I am not exactly sure when this was feature was introduced, but it can definitely be useful for both auditing but also debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

Of course, I was curious about this information and wanted to see if I could retrieve it using something like PowerCLI. However when I started to look for the API, I realized that there may not be a public API for this ... but that did not stopped me and taking a look at Chrome Developer, I quickly saw the endpoint which was /rest/appliance/update/history and I was able to figure out a workaround giving the same data.

Below are two examples on accessing this data using either PowerShell or cURL

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