VMware Provides a Kubernetes On-Ramp for vSphere Workloads
Enterprise infrastructure software giant VMware is coupling its vSphere virtualization platform with its Tanzu portfolio to help extend millions of workloads already running on vSphere into the Kubernetes ecosystem, the company said.
VMware also revealed updates for vSphere 7 and vSAN 7, as well as for Cloud Foundation 4.1 to help support Kubernetes deployments and to manage stateful applications running in containerized environments, including storage.
In addition to offering vSphere with Tanzu (which will become available by end of October), VMware is also offering Cloud Foundation hybrid platform with Tanzu as of today.
Speaking during a press presentation, Craig McLuckie, vice president of research and development at VMware and one of the original creators of Kubernetes, described how the “Tanzu portfolio covers a broad gamut of capabilities that unlock productivity for engineering teams, large and small.”
“The starting point, obviously, is Kubernetes itself — we see this as being an incredibly powerful new infrastructure service abstraction that is low enough level that you can run pretty much anything and high enough level that it hides away the specifics of the environment so that organizations are able to just benefit from the infrastructure capabilities,” McLuckie said.
While vSphere with Tanzu is the “fastest way for many of our customers to get started with Kubernetes,” VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu is very similar, Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing, said during the press conference on Tuesday. Cloud Foundation with Tanzu allows, among other things, Kubernetes workloads to run across hybrid cloud environments to “allow operators to offer up infrastructure to developers that way they want to consume it, namely through a Kubernetes API.” This capability allows developers to use the tools that they have already implemented, while Cloud Foundation with Tanzu “is great to operate Kubernetes at scale, because it’s completely automated” for its configuration and deployment, Caswell said.
vSphere with Tanzu also integrates Kubernetes management capabilities, representing what Caswell said is “the biggest re-architecture around a decade for vSphere.” With it, organizations can adopt and integrate Kubernetes into their VSphere environments, allowing IT administrators to deploy Kubernetes “with the same skill sets that they already acquired by using VSphere.” Meanwhile, the developer can “can consume the infrastructure the way they’re used to doing it and the way they want to do it through Kubernetes interfaces and APIs” when they deploy applications on vSphere with Tanzu, Caswell said.
With vSphere with Tanzu “Customers can bring their own networking and they can bring their own storage: that’s a key difference from VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu,” Caswell said.
As mentioned above, VMware also provided detailed on updates to vSphere 7 (Update 1) and to vSAN 7 (Update 1):
- vSphere 7 allows virtual machines (VMs) to scale up to 24TB and “768 vCPUs” to support “resource-intensive applications,” such as in-memory databases.
- Cluster scale enhancements for vSphere 7, expanded support for the number of hosts per cluster by 50% for a total of 96 hosts per cluster.
- vSAN 7 offers HCI Mesh for disaggregation of compute and storage resources for incremental scaling.
- Compression-only option for vSAN 7 offers a compression-only option, instead of both de-duplication and compression, which will not thwart space-management efficiency for databases.
- Enterprise-ready file services for vSAN 7 for most common file service protocols by adding support for the SMB v3 and v2.1 protocols.
VMware is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image from Pixabay.
