Bypassing vSphere with Tanzu managed virtual machine permissions for troubleshooting purposes

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms

You run into an issue where you need to bypass containerized permissions in vSphere with Tanzu for troubleshooting.

Situations where you would need to bypass containerized permissions include but are not limited to

• Needing to vMotion a Supervisor Control Plane VM or TKGS Node to troubleshooting networking / an issue with the esxi host the VM lives on.
• Needing to expand the resources of a TKGS node when the api server isnt responsive or able to scale the nodes vertically. However it is recommended to expand the resources from the ESXi Host Console as root as that is an easier process than bypassing containerized permissions. 

Regular VM operations should be done on the host directly logged in as root and not by bypassing containerized permissions. 

• Graceful reboot of the VM
• Console into the VM
  
  

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x

VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Cause

vSphere with Tanzu virtual machines are managed entirely by vSphere with Tanzu, and under normal operations, should not be modified directly by an end user. Therefore these objects are heavily restricted/read-only even for users in the Administrators group.

Resolution

Please engage Broadcom support for resolution.