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NVIDIA GPU with Dynamic DirectPath IO (Passthrough) to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using vSphere with Tanzu

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When provisioning a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC) using vSphere with Tanzu, you can easily request an NVIDIA GPU resource as part of the deployment, which can either be provided by NVIDIA vGPU or using PCIe passthrough with Dynamic DirectPath IO.

vGPU is great for those with a capable NVIDIA GPU, especially if the GPU will not be utilized 100% and you can share its resources amongst several VMs. However, if you do not have a capable GPU that supports vGPU, you can still provide you TKC workloads with a GPU resource using passthrough.


While playing with the Lenovo P3 Ultra, I unfortunately came to learn that NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop was NOT the same as an NVIDIA RTX A5500 🙁

Not ideal, but I guess NVIDIA did not want to add this additional device to their test matrix and hence their ESXi graphics drivers would not detect the GPU as vGPU capable. I knew that I could still use the NVIDIA GPU via passthrough but to my surprise, I just needed to get the NVIDIA drivers installed onto the TKC worker nodes.

That was much easier said than done as all the documentation that I could find on both VMware and NVIDIA website had detailed instructions for vGPU configuration but there was little to no documentation on how to use NVIDIA GPU in passthrough mode with vSphere with Tanzu. I came across a number of different NVIDIA solutions when it comes to k8s, but it was not very clear on which would be interoperable with vSphere with Tanzu and I eventually figured it out with the help pointing me in the right direction.

It was actually super easy, once you knew the exact steps! ?

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How to download offline copy of the vSphere Kubernetes releases (VKr) Content Library?

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As part of the setup for vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), a local vSphere Content Library needs be created to store the various vSphere Kubernetes releases (VKr) which users typically synchronize from VMware's online VKr Content Library repository.


I typically recommend configuring the content library subscription to only download files when needed, rather than the entire library, which is currently over 200GB+.

After standing up another VKS environment, I needed to download additional VKr images but I could not reuse my existing subscribed content library since it was configured on a different vCenter Server.

With the ability to host a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology, I realized a better solution would be for me to simply download the full VMware VKr Content Library and host that locally on my network rather than re-downloading the same images each time I have a new deployment.

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Quick Tip - vSphere 7.0 Update 3o also supports disabling/enabling vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) in vSphere UI

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I recently shared that in vSphere 8.0 Update, you can now easily manage the vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) configuration by using either the vSphere UI or a new vSphere API, which simplifies this operation if you need to disable vCLS for a particular vSphere Cluster or if you need to remediate one by disabling and re-enabling the feature. Today, the process is less than ideal as you need to add a new vCenter Server Advanced Setting for each vSphere Cluster that you want to disable vCLS on.

For customers still on vSphere 7.x, I just found out from our vCLS Engineering team, that the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3o, which was just released less than 24 hours ago, also includes this enhancement for managing vCLS configuration (enable/disable) using the vSphere UI!


One thing to note is that the new vSphere API that was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 to manage this exact same vCLS setting is not available in vSphere 7.0 Update 3o. If you wish to automate this configuration for vSphere 7.x environment, you will need to add the required vCenter Server Advanced Setting using the vSphere API.