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Single node Supervisor Control Plane VM for vSphere with Tanzu now possible in vSphere 7.0 Update 3

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Last year, when vSphere with Kubernetes (original name of what is now vSphere with Tanzu) was first released, I had shared a process on how to deploy a minimal setup including a detailed write-up for setting up vSphere with Tanzu on an Intel NUC with just 32GB of memory.

I am always looking for ways to simplify and ease the consumption of various VMware technologies within a homelab and I was pretty happy with the tweaks that I could make to reduce the amount of resources needed to run vSphere with Tanzu. Instead of needing to deploy three Supervisor Control Plane VMs, the modification to the vSphere with Tanzu configuration, allowed me to deploy just two Supervisor Control Plane VMs. It was unfortunate that deploying only a single Supervisor Control Plane VM at the time was not possible due to a known issue.

While deploying a pre-release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3 in one of my lab environments, I was going through the process of tweaking the vSphere with Tanzu configuration before enablement and I figure why not try the one node setting, in case it was fixed 🤷 I honestly was not expecting it to work since there was an internal bug that was filed awhile back and I had not seen the bug closed. To my complete surprise, vSphere with Tanzu enabled successfully and there was just a single Supervisor Control Plane VM!


It turns out that someone from Engineering must have fixed the issue and a single Supervisor Control Plane VM is now possible with the upcoming release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3! 🥳

To change the settings, you will need to SSH to the VCSA and edit the following configuration file /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml and search for minmasters and maxmasters and change the value from 3 to 1.

minmasters = 1
maxmasters = 1

For the changes to go into effect, you will need to restart the vSphere with Tanzu service which is listed as wcp by running the following command:

service-control --restart wcp

In addition, for homelab purposes, you may also want to change the controlplane_vm_disk_provisioning parameter, which defaults the Supervisor Control Plane VM to Thick provisioned rather than Thin, which many folks use in their labs.

controlplane_vm_disk_provisioning = "thin"

Quick Tip - How to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) with a single Service Engine

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I saw an interesting question today from Robert Kloosterhuis in the private vExpert App Modernization Slack Channel who working with vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) and wanted to know if it was possible to deploy NSX-ALB with just a single Service Engine (SE)?

The default behavior of NSX-ALB is to deploy two SE for availability purpose but for testing and/or homelab usage, it could certainly help with resources and time to spin up an environment using NSX-ALB. I was also curious if this was possible and reached out to NSX-ALB Engineering team and within a few minutes, I got a response that not only was this possible to do but pretty easy to configure.

To modify this default behavior, we need to update the Service Engine group prior to SE VMs being deployed. To do so, login to NSX-ALB UI and under Infrastructure->Service Engine Group and then click on the Advanced tab and change the default Buffer Service Engines value of 1 to 0 which will will have NSX-ALB deploy just a single SE VM rather than the default two.


To confirm that our NSX-ALB have been configured correctly, I have enabled vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-ALB and as you can see from the screenshot below, only a single SE VM has been deployed rather than the default behavior of two SE.

Quick Tip - Resizing vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor Control Plane VMs

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During the enablement of vSphere with Tanzu, users can specify the size (Tiny, Small, Medium and Large) which will then dictate the amount of CPU and Memory that is allocated for the Supervisor Control Plane VMs.


After vSphere with Tanzu has been successfully enabled, you will find that only a subset of the settings can be re-configured but the Size is not one of those settings.


There was a question recently asking if you could resize the resources for the Supervisor Control Plane VMs? Although the vSphere UI does not allow you to modify the Control Plane Size value, the vSphere with Tanzu REST API can be used to perform this operation.

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