vSphere IaaS Control Plane

The vSphere IaaS Control Plane, formerly known as vSphere with Tanzu, is a powerful platform designed to run containerized applications natively on VMware’s vSphere infrastructure. This control plane transforms vSphere clusters into a developer-ready platform where DevOps engineers and application developers can run Kubernetes applications in a self-service manner1.

Key Features

1. Supervisors: When enabled on vSphere clusters, the vSphere IaaS control plane creates a Kubernetes control plane directly on the hypervisor layer. These clusters are referred to as Supervisors.
2. vSphere Namespaces: Supervisors allow vSphere administrators to create vSphere Namespaces, which are dedicated namespaces configured with specific amounts of memory, CPU, and storage.
3. vSphere Pods: DevOps engineers and application developers can deploy vSphere Pods, VMs, or upstream Kubernetes clusters through VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) within these namespaces.
4. Integrated Management: The vSphere IaaS control plane provides integrated management capabilities, allowing vSphere administrators to manage both the underlying virtual environment and the Kubernetes infrastructure seamlessly.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-with-tanzu-concepts-planning/GUID-70CAF0BB-1722-4526-9CE7-D5C92C15D7D0.html