Getting "The service version is incompatible with the selected Supervisor and cannot be deployed. Choose a different version or resolve the issues with the Supervisor before proceeding" when trying to upgrade the TKG service.

Products

• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service

Issue/Introduction

• Under workload management, when attempting to upgrade the "Tanzu Kubernetes Grid" service version to 3.3.2 from 3.3.1, it errors out with "The service version is incompatible with the selected Supervisor and cannot be deployed. Choose a different version or resolve the issues with the Supervisor before proceeding."
  
  
• This happens when the upgrade is attempted for the "embedded" version of the Supervisor Service.
  
  
• There are no issues with the vCenter Server's connectivity to the management IP Address of the Supervisor control plane virtual machines over port 5000.

 

Environment

vSphere Kubernetes Service 3.x

Cause

An embedded version of the supervisor service, also known as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service is coupled with as well as managed by the vCenter Server. In case the vCenter server is upgraded/patched to a version higher, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service can only be upgraded to the version which is coupled with that version/build of vCenter Server.

Example:

8.o u3e is packaged with VKS 3.3.2 embedded
8.0 U3g is packaged with VKS 3.3.3 embedded

An upgrade done from vCenter 8.0.3 (VKS 3.0.0) to vCenter 8.0 U3e, then followed by a Supervisor upgrade. This will add VKS 3.3.2 embedded version (3.3.2-embedded) in the list of VKS versions that are available for upgrades.  Then Upgrade vCenter to 8.0 U3g followed by a Supervisor upgraded to a version from 8.0 U3g. At this point VKS version 3.3.2-embedded and 3.3.3-embedded will both be listed in the dropdown. Upgrading from VKS 3.0.0 to VKS 3.3.2-embedded will fail because VKS v3.3.2-embedded was packaged with 8.0 U3e Supervisor and because current Supervisor version is from 8.0 U3g, the 3.3.2-embedded packages have been removed.

Resolution

Use the Asynchronous version of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service instead which can be obtained/downloaded from the Broadcom Support portal. This Asynchronous version package is called as "Kubernetes service". This way you don't have to rely on the VKS version which comes embedded, and you get to choose and customize which Kubernetes service version you'd like to be on. 

Refer the following documentation on installing a Supervisor Services, including installing a version manually- GitHub - vsphere-tmm/Supervisor-Services: Supervisor Services