Cannot change the Management Network portgroup for an active Supervisor in VMware Cloud Foundation 9

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• The system administrator needs to change the Management Network portgroup or VLAN for the Supervisor Control Plane after it has been deployed and activated in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.
• The user interface does not provide an option to modify the underlying Distributed Port Group (DVPG) or its associated IP subnet.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.x
• vSphere Supervisor
• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)

Cause

• During the initial enablement phase, the Supervisor Control Plane VMs are statically bound to a specific Distributed Port Group (DVPG) and assigned an IP subnet.
• Modifying the underlying Management Network portgroup and its associated IP block post-deployment is currently unsupported by the VCF/Supervisor architecture.

Resolution

To associate the Supervisor and its dependent VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) components with a different Management Network portgroup or VLAN, the cluster must be redeployed. 

1. Deactivate the Supervisor cluster.
   **Note:** This action removes the Control Plane VMs and destroys any running VKS clusters and associated workloads.
2. Re-enable the Supervisor cluster using the target portgroup and new IP address allocation.

Additional Information

• The Management Network portgroup is immutable post-deployment, other parameters such as DNS servers, NTP servers, and DNS search domains can be modified dynamically.
• Additionally, Workload Networks (which provide networking for the VKS namespaces and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters) can be added or modified without deactivating the Supervisor.