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Quick Tip - vSphere Permission to view vSphere with Tanzu Namespaces

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If you wish to create a custom vSphere Role that has the ability to view vSphere Namespaces which is part of vSphere with Tanzu, you will need to add the user to the following vSphere Single Sign-On Group: ServiceProviderUsers, which is located under Single Sign On->Users and Groups->Groups (2nd page) within the vSphere UI.


Once added, you can logout and log back in and the user should now see the vSphere Namespaces as shown in the screenshot below. In my example, I have a user named william which is created in the default vsphere.local domain and has been assigned the user the vSphere Read Only role along with this additional SSO group. They will be able to view all resources but will not have permission to make any changes to the infrastructure. If you are using Active Directory, the exact same process works and just make sure you log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

Can I deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu on same vSphere Cluster?

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A simple question with a simple answer, yes! I have seen this question get asked in various internal Slack channels on whether you can deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu (formally Project Pacific) on the same vSphere Cluster? If you were an early user of TKG, you may recall that if you attempted to deploy TKG to a vSphere Cluster which already had vSphere with Tanzu enabled, it would prevent you from proceeding. Instead of having to deploy another Kubernetes management control plane, you could simply leverage and connect to the Supervisor Cluster control plane using the TKG CLI and start deploying TKG Workload Clusters.

From a technical standpoint, there is no reason that TKG and vSphere with Tanzu could not co-exist on the same vSphere Cluster. In fact, this request has come up a number of times that the original TKG behavior has been recently updated to now allow for this co-existence. From an exploratory and learning point of view, this is quite useful to be able to try out both solution and not have to dedicate a specific vSphere Cluster for each of the Tanzu Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. A more practical use case that came up recently from a customer was being able to use both solution as a way to consolidate their workloads using a specific Tanzu K8s solution, which makes total sense. Today, there are still some differences in terms of the features and capabilities between TKG and vSphere with Tanzu and depending on your needs, you may have a use case for both in your environment.

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Quick Tip - Accessing the VM Console for VMs deployed using vSphere with Tanzu VM Service

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One constraint of the new vSphere with Tanzu VM Service, which was introduced in vSphere 7.0 Update 2a is that the VM Console of the deployed VM is not accessible by end users including vSphere Administrators.


When things are working fine, this is generally not needed but when something goes wrong such as debugging or troubleshooting guest customization or networking issues, then having access to the VM Console is a must! In speaking with the VM Service PM, this is already being tracked in their backlog and hopefully we will have a solution for this in the future.

For now, there is a quick workaround which I have personally used it myself while deploying Nested ESXi VMs using the VM Service. Since this question has come up a few times now, I wanted to document the specific instructions and make it easy for anyone who may have a need for this. 100% Credit goes to Florian Grehl who shared this solution on his blog but on a completely unrelated topic.

UPDATE (05/20/21) - Florian also shared via Twitter, another and quicker way to access the VM Console is if you have direct ESXi host access, you can access the VM Console that way as well. I am usually logged into vCenter Server anyhow, so I prefer method outlined below.

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