Advanced clusters

This document provides information about the advanced clusters feature and the implications of enabling it. The advanced clusters feature is available for Preview for version 1.31 admin clusters and user clusters.

Note the following limitations of this preview:

  • You can enable advanced cluster at cluster creation time for new 1.31 clusters only.
  • After advanced cluster is enabled, you won't be able to upgrade the cluster to 1.32. Only enable advanced cluster in a test environment.

This page is for Admins and architects who define IT solutions and system architecture in accordance with company strategy, and create and manage policies related to user permissions. To learn more about common roles and example tasks that we reference in Google Cloud content, see Common GKE Enterprise user roles and tasks.

Consistent experience and implementation

The advanced clusters feature implements a cluster architecture that better aligns Google Distributed Cloud for VMware with the rest of the Google Distributed Cloud products. A cluster that has advanced clusters enabled has a shared platform with other Google Distributed Cloud clusters. This shared platform uses the same controllers and agents, which increases reliability and can help Google provide better support. There's also improved performance for cluster operations when advanced clusters is enabled.

The new architecture brings a consistent experience and implementation with all other Google Distributed Cloud offerings, and you can benefit from feature parity with other Google Distributed Cloud offerings in the long run.

Access to new features

You enable advanced clusters to access the latest features and capability, such as topology domains, which gives you better control over how your workloads are distributed across your cluster nodes.

In future minor releases, advanced features, such as topology domains, are available for advanced clusters only.

Differences when running advanced clusters

When you enable advanced clusters, some features or capabilities might not work the same as they do for clusters without the feature enabled. Some of these changes apply only while the feature is in Preview. The differences are noted throughout the documentation.

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