vSphere Pods fail with error "A specified parameter was not correct: DistributedVirtualPortgroup: ErrImagePull"

Products

• Tanzu Kubernetes Runtime

Issue/Introduction

• Supervisor Services fail to start vSphere Pods on ESXi hosts 
• vSphere Pod deployments fail on ESXi hosts but may succeed on Supervisor VMs ( Control Plane ) nodes. 
• The pod describe displays the below error :
  

  A specified parameter was not correct: DistributedVirtualPortgroup: ErrImagePull

• Supervisor was enabled with vDS network
• The Supervisor network uses an NSX backed portgroup for the primary workload network. 
• The load balancer in use is AVI

Environment

vSphere with Tanzu 8.x

vDS(NSX-T Managed)  with AVI

Cause

NSX backed vDS portgroups cannot be used as the Primary Workload network on Supervisor Networking .

Resolution

There are 2 possible resolutions

1. Install and Configure Standalone Velero and Restic on TKG Clusters
2. Redeploy the supervisor in a fully supported network configuration referring the below documentation --> Networking for vSphere Supervisor