Supervisor Network Services
This section describes the procedures for deploying the Supervisor within a vSphere environment.
Different network options for Supervisor deployment
1. Without NSX
Architecture: Uses VDS port groups and deploys or consume load balancers to handle load balancing traffic.
Best for: VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), lab environments, Proof of Concepts (PoC), or smaller environments.
Limitation: Limited Network Services (only LB) and limited VCF Automation support (no namespace create/delete/update from VCFA).
- 1a. VDS + FLB
Metric /Feature |
1a. VDS + FLB  |
|---|---|
| Physical Fabric | MTU ≥ 1500, L2 Physical |
| VCF-A Support | 🔴 No |
| Network Services | 🔴 Limited (No Subnets, No NAT, No VPN) |
| Scale | 🔴 Limited (All VMs and K8s consume a Public IP, all VIPs are managed by a single FLB A/S) |
| Security | 🔴 Direct Access (K8s Nodes reachable from external) |
| High Availability | 🔴 Limited (Supervisor VMs cross Clusters requires shared-VDS) |
2. With NSX
Architecture: Uses NSX Distributed or Centralized Transit Gateways and VNA or Edge Cluster to handle load balancing traffic.
Best for: Fully integrated VCF architecture for better scale and security.
Consideration: Requires fully deployed NSX overlay infrastructure with DTGW+VNA or CTGW+Edge+T0.
Metric /Feature |
2a. NSX + CTGW(TEP)  |
2b. NSX + DTGW VLAN(TEP)  |
2c. NSX + DTGW VXLAN(TEP)  |
2d. NSX + DTGW VLAN(TEP-Less)  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical Fabric | MTU ≥ 1700, L2 or L3 Fabric with VLAN + BGP |
MTU ≥ 1700, L2 Fabric with VLAN |
MTU ≥ 1700, EVPN Fabric + BGP |
MTU ≥ 1500, L2 Fabric with VLAN |
| VCF-A Support | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes |
| Network Services | 🟢 All  |
🟢 Most (All but VPN) |
🟢 Most (All but VPN) |
🔴 Limited (No Subnets private, No NAT, No VPN, Supports VMs with IP unicast traffic only (no multicast/VRRP/HSRP/etc))  |
| Scale | 🟢 Large | 🟢 Large | 🟢 Large | 🔴 Limited (All VMs and K8s consume a Public IP) |
| Security | 🟢 Isolated | 🟢 Isolated | 🟢 Isolated | 🔴 Direct Access (K8s Nodes reachable from external) |
| High Availability | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes | 🟢 Yes |
Upcoming Architectures
The following architectures will be covered in future updates:
- Avi Load Balancer
Document Versioning
This guide is updated for VCF 9.1+.
If you are running an older version, some options may not be available.