What is a Data Plane in VMware Tanzu Data Management Console?

A Kubernetes cluster that hosts database services that are self-managed via Tanzu Data Management Console (TDMC). Installing TDMC bootstraps components and operators onto this cluster, to run TDMC services. Users log in to Tanzu Data Management Console to provision and manage database instances and their users via a browser-based GUI, the tdmc CLI, or an API.

Types of Data Planes in VMware Tanzu Data Management Console

There are 2 types of Data planes

Dedicated Data Plane: A data plane cluster that hosts service instances that can only be used by members of a specific organization.
Shared Data Plane: A data plane cluster that hosts service instances that can be used by members of all organization

Supported Kubernetes Versions

The following are supported K8s versions for Data Plane.

Distribution	K8s Versions
vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) previously known as Tanzu Kubernetes Service (TKGs)	v1.27.11—vmware.1-fips.1-tkg.2 v1.28.8—vmware.1-fips.1-tkg.2
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multi-cloud (TKGm)	2.5.0 Kubernetes versions v1.28, v1.27
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)	K8s version 1.28 and 1.27
RedHat Openshift	K8s version v1.28.7+f1b5f6c

Port Requirements

Source	Destination	Port/Service	Purpose
Bootstrap Machine	TKGs K8s Data Plane Cluster	6443 (HTTPs)	To install TDMC SM control plane
TKGs K8s Data Plane Cluster Nodes	Private Container Registry	443 (HTTPs)	To pull images Applicable for Airgapped environment only
TKGs K8s Data Plane Cluster Nodes	Broadcom Image Registry URLs tdmc.packages.broadcom.com *s3.amazonaws.com	443 (HTTPs)	To pull images Applicable for Non-Airgapped environment only
TKGs K8s Data Plane Cluster Nodes	TKGs K8s Control Plane Cluster Nodes	53 (TCP/UDP) 443 (HTTPs) 6443 (HTTPs)

For a detailed list of ports exposed by the TDMC Control Plane on the Kubernetes Cluster. Please refer to the documentation.

Onboarding Procedure

Create Cloud Provider Accounts to VMware Tanzu Data Management Console

Before you can onboard TKC Clusters to TDMC you will need a Cloud Provider Account

To create cloud provider accounts, log in to TDMC as an SRE, navigate to Infrastructure > Cloud Provider Accounts, and Click Add a Cloud Provider Account

Select Provider as TKGs
Select Hosting Type as Shared
- You can refer above for types of data plane)
Provide Credentials
- For a detailed list of permissions you can refer to documentation . For POC we will use administartor@vsphere.local account

Add Data Plane to VMware Tanzu Management Console

Log in to Tanzu Data Management Console as an SRE user, navigate to Infrastructure > Data Planes, and click Create New Data Plane at the upper right.

Select Provider as TKGs and Select Hosting Type as Shared (You can refer above for types of data plane)

Select the Cloud Provider Account that you added in the previous step. It will fetch the list of K8s Clusters on the cloud provider account namespace. Select the Cluster for hosting the data plane

Select the Storage Class. In my lab, I have used vsan-default-storage-policy