Kubernetes Hit: VMware Tanzu Injected In vSphere, vSAN, VxRail

Here are the six new VMware offerings integrated with VMware Tanzu, along with new software launches such as HCI Mesh and the vSAN Data Persistence platform.

VMware Integrating Kubernetes Everywhere

VMware is continuing its massive Kubernetes march with the launch today of new product releases for vSphere, vSAN, VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation injected with VMware Tanzu in a move to push customers to more rapidly adopt Kubernetes.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization superstar also unleashed on Tuesday new software offerings such as HCI Mesh and the vSAN Data Persistence platform, along with enhanced scaling capabilities and new Tanzu editions.

VMware is seeking to dominate the Kubernetes market with its VMware Tanzu platform of services designed to deliver enterprise-grade Kubernetes at scale. VMware’s growing portfolio includes Tanzu Application Service, its centralized management platform Tanzu Mission Control, as well as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid that enables customers to run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment on any infrastructure with built-in security. Customers can combine Tanzu with solutions such as VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere to provide infrastructure and application management for cloud-native adoption.

Here are the new VMware software offerings and Tanzu integrations the company unveiled on Tuesday.

VMware vSphere 7 With Tanzu; ‘Monster VMs’

VMware launched today its vSphere 7 update 1, which will provide an easy way for vSphere customers to get started with Kubernetes and modernize the 70 million-plus workloads currently running on vSphere. Customers can now quickly set up and provision Kubernetes clusters in support of modern applications.

vSphere 7 Update 1 has expanded support for the number of hosts per cluster by 50 percent for a total of 96 hosts per cluster. Additionally, vSphere 7 Update 1 VMs scale up to 24 terabytes and 768 vCPUs to deliver “monster VMs” in support of resource intensive applications such as in-memory databases, said VMware.

vSphere with Tanzu will allow customers to configure enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure with their existing network and block or file storage in less than an hour. This includes allowing customers to extend vSphere Distributed Switch support for Kubernetes clusters and deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials or choose their own layer-four load balancing solutions.

Additionally, when using VMware vCenter Server, customers can deploy Kubernetes clusters in minutes, provision role-based access and allocate capacity to developers. The new VMware Tanzu integration allows administrators to manage compliant and conformant Kubernetes while providing developers self-service access to IT infrastructure.

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 With Tanzu

VMware Cloud Foundation is the company’s flagship hybrid cloud platform for managing VMs and orchestrating containers, built on full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology.

On Tuesday, VMware unleashed VMware Cloud Foundation version 4.1 with VMware Tanzu includes the new vSAN Data Persistence platform as well as new remote cluster capabilities enable VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 to extend its operational capabilities to edge locations and branch offices. Additionally, new vVols integration into VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 with Tanzu provides a common storage management framework for external storage.

Lastly, VMware Cloud Foundation now has VMware Skyline Support. VMware Skyline brings proactive intelligence to VMware Cloud Foundation by identifying management and workload domains and proactively surfacing VMware Cloud Foundation solution findings.

New vSAN Data Persistence; Partnerships With Dell, Cloudian, DataStax

VMware unveiled its a new vSAN Data Persistence platform. The new platform is aimed at independent software vendors to enable modern stateful services such as object storage and NoSQL databases to integrate with the underlying infrastructure. The integrations will allow customers to run their stateful applications with lower total cost of ownership and simplified operations and management, VMware said.

VMware has formed several new partnerships and co-engineering efforts with Cloudian, DataStax, Dell Technologies and MinIO to integrate and validate their offerings on the vSAN Data Persistence platform. Partners will introduce plug-ins in support of the platform over time.

In conjunction with these vendor partnerships, the new platform will enable developers to use Kubernetes APIs to provision and scale stateful services on-demand in a self-service model with minimal administrator intervention. The vSAN Data Persistence platform also delivers integrated service health and capacity monitoring through dedicated dashboards in VMware vCenter.

Lastly, the new vSAN platform will leverage service-aware infrastructure operations to ensure service availability during infrastructure changes including maintenance and lifecycle management as well as be able to run stateful services with optimal storage efficiency.

VMware vSAN With New HCI Mesh

VMware’s vSAN 7 Update 1 introduces the new HCI Mesh, a software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources that helps customers to scale incrementally. The new HCI Mesh helps customers to reduce CapEX by sharing capacity across clusters while lowering OpEX as they reduce the amount of storage resources managed by scaling efficiently, VMware said.

The new vSAN 7 Update 1 allows customers to enable compression-only instead of deduplication and compression. Customers will benefit from an increase in usable capacity and improved performance across both all-flash and hybrid systems without compromising space efficiency for databases, according to VMware.

Additionally, vSAN 7 Update 1 now offers all of the most common file service protocols by adding support for the SMB v3 and v2.1 protocols. The vSAN File Services now features Active Directory integration for enterprise-ready file storage and Kerberos support for network authentication. With these new capabilities, VMware said its customers can use vSAN for both block and file storage for most use cases.

VMware Tanzu on VxRail; Dell ‘Only HCI Vendor’ With ‘Fully Integrated Tanzu’

Vxrail is the world’s most popular hyperconverged infrastructure offering which is co-engineered between VMware and Dell EMC. On Tuesday, the two companies unveiled new VMware Tanzu on Dell EMC VxRail integrations to provide multiple, fully integrated HCI options to enable customers to build, run and manage Kubernetes container-based applications.

“To help customers accelerate application modernization, VxRail delivers ‘Kubernetes at Cloud Speed’ with multiple, fully integrated HCI infrastructure options to run vSphere with Tanzu,” said Chad Dunn, Dell Technologies vice president of product management for VxRail in a blog post on Tuesday. “In fact, Dell Technologies is the only HCI vendor offering a fully integrated Tanzu portfolio with reference architecture, cluster, and private cloud offerings - all on VxRail.”

VMware Tanzu on VxRail flexible infrastructure options enable businesses to rapidly adopt Kubernetes to keep pace with the speed of business, Dunn said. The new VxRail with Tanzu includes many of the new software products VMware launch on Tuesday such as HCI Mesh, which enables storage resource sharing across clusters.

Curated VxRail systems come fully integrated and ready to deploy, while providing automated infrastructure deployment and cloud-like resource pooling, elasticity, agility/speed, and programmability to accelerate Kubernetes infrastructure delivery.

“Whether you’re ready to jump into the world of Tanzu, or just looking for the latest innovations in HCI for data center modernization, hybrid cloud adoption, or edge deployments, VxRail has you covered through tight integration with the latest VMware HCI software releases,” said Dunn.

New Tanzu Editions

In conjunction with all of the new Tanzu integrations and features, VMware is introducing VMware Tanzu editions which packages portfolio capabilities that address the most common enterprise requirements to modernize infrastructure and applications.

The VMware Tanzu editions consist of Basic, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

VMware Tanzu Basic is an add-on to vSphere that entitles customers to run Kubernetes as part of their vSphere environment.

The VMware Tanzu Standard edition enables customers to run and manage Kubernetes across multiple clouds with a single, open source aligned distribution, and centralized management of policy across clouds, clusters and teams.

The Basic and Standard editions will be available this quarter, while VMware did not provide any details on the Advanced and Enterprise editions will be available later this year.