According to the VMware official guide, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a cloud-native service mesh platform that simplifies the secure communication between microservices running in Kubernetes clusters . It provides secure and consistent network communication between services and enables policy-driven authorization and observability. With its distributed tracing capabilities, Tanzu Service Mesh can help administrators easily monitor and troubleshoot their applications. It also provides a unified platform to manage the lifecycle of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, including provisioning, upgrades, patching, and more.

Management “and Server” network - 172.18.0.0/16

“and Server” being the 250 application servers.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.6/hcx-user-guide/GUID-DBDB4D1B-60B6-4D16-936B-4AC632606909.html

Detected and Restricted Source Network Types

The HCX Network Extension service detects and prevents several non-supported Network Extension scenarios (items are dimmed in the Network Extension UI):

• vSphere infrastructure networks (ESXi VMkernel networks).