VCF Stretched Supervisor Deployment: SDDC Manager Existing VDS Assignment Limitation

Products

• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service

Issue/Introduction

In VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), when attempting to configure a vSphere Kubernetes Service (WCP) Stretched Supervisor cluster spanning multiple Availability Zones (AZs) via SDDC Manager or VCF Operations, the workflow fails to provide an option to select a pre-existing Distributed Switch (VDS).

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.x
SDDC Manager 9.0.x
vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) 

Cause

SDDC Manager 9.0.x automated cluster expansion workflows are hard-coded to provision unique Distributed Switch (VDS) instances for each new cluster.
Stretched Supervisor clusters require a single VDS spanning all participating zones to satisfy management network validation, creating a functional mismatch with current automation logic.

Resolution

If you encounter this limitation, please use the following manual workaround:

1. Deploy Cluster: Use SDDC Manager to deploy the ESXi clusters into the desired Workload Domain zones using default networking settings.

2. Manual VDS Migration: Log into the vCenter Server and manually migrate the ESXi hosts from the SDDC-created VDS to the desired shared/stretched VDS.

3. Verify VDS Health and MTU Settings: Ensure that the shared VDS is healthy across all three zones. Confirm that the MTU is consistently set (typically 1700 or higher for Geneve/NSX overlay traffic) across all physical switches, host uplinks, and VDS port groups to prevent packet fragmentation during WCP enablement.

4. WCP Configuration: Navigate to Workload Management in vCenter and manually initiate the Supervisor Cluster enablement.

5. Networking Selection: During the manual wizard, select the shared VDS that now encompasses all hosts across the three zones.

Three Management Zones with Combined Workload Zones Model
Configuring and Managing vSphere Zones
VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0: Release Notes

Additional Information