VMware has announced VMware Tanzu, a new line of products and services designed to change how enterprises build software on Kubernetes. Among these technologies previewed at VMWorld is Project Pacific and VMware Tanzu Mission Control. Project Pacific embeds Kubernetes natively into VMware vSphere, which converges containers and VMs to establish vSphere as an application platform for the future, while Tanzu Mission Control offers a single point of control from where customers can manage all their Kubernetes clusters no matter where they run. Together, VMware believes that they will make Kubernetes more accessible to more enterprises, as they give operators more control and security, and developers more self-service resources and independence.
VMware has announced VMware Tanzu, a new line of products and services designed to change how enterprises build software on Kubernetes. Among these technologies previewed at VMWorld is Project Pacific and VMware Tanzu Mission Control. Project Pacific embeds Kubernetes natively into VMware vSphere, which converges containers and VMs to establish vSphere as an application platform for the future, while Tanzu Mission Control offers a single point of control from where customers can manage all their Kubernetes clusters no matter where they run. Together, VMware believes that they will make Kubernetes more accessible to more enterprises, as they give operators more control and security, and developers more self-service resources and independence.
With these new technologies added to Kubernetes, enterprises will be able to build modern applications on a Cloud Native Platform using:
- Bitnami, which provides the largest catalog of pre-built, scanned, tested, and continuously maintained application content for your Kubernetes clusters. The Bitnami application catalog supports and has been certified for all major Kubernetes platforms, including VMware PKS. Moreover, VMware has unveiled Project Galleon as a beta offering, which will enable enterprise IT to customize their up-to-date application stacks and formats to multi-cloud ready end-developers.
- Partner Pivotal, which announced that Spring Initializer was used to create more than 1.5 million Java-based development projects in the past 30 days.
- ISV Ecosystem, which VMware works with to validate additional software and services for its upstream Kubernetes-based solutions.
- Professional services, which has allowed VMware to rapidly build out its Kubernetes Architect team and Instruction practice, providing customers with expert guidance across all steps of their cloud-native journey.
VMware’s technology preview of Project Pacific will enterprises to embed Kubernetes in a future release of vSphere and thus gives enterprises the option to accelerate development and operation of modern apps on VMware vSphere (Note: it will continue to leverage existing investments in technology, tools and skillsets). Project Pacific will deliver the following capabilities:
- Project Pacific will add Kubernetes to vSphere, which will enable the convergence of containers and VMs onto a single platform. Project Pacific will also add a container runtime into the hypervisor. The new ESXi native pods will combine the best properties of Kubernetes pods and VMs to help deliver a secure and high-performance runtime for mission-critical workloads. Additionally, Project Pacific will deliver a native virtual network spanning VMs and containers.
- App-focused Management, which will allow Project Pacific to offer app-level control for applying policies, quota and role-based access to developers. Moreover, IT will have unified visibility into vCenter Server for Kubernetes clusters, containers, and existing VMs, as well as apply enterprise-grade capabilities such as High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler, and vMotion at the app level.
- Dev and IT Ops Collaboration, which will allow IT operators to use vSphere tools so they can deliver Kubernetes clusters to developers, who can then use Kubernetes APIs to access SDDC infrastructure.
- AI / ML Application Support, which will allow Project Pacific to offer support for running GPU enabled apps.
In addition, enterprises that want to start using Kubernetes on vSphere can now adopt VMware PKS. This is VMware’s flagship Kubernetes offering, which provides customers with access to consistent implementation of open-source Kubernetes to deploy on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and/or on public clouds.
Also announced is a tech preview of Tanzu Mission Control, the first offering in the VMware Tanzu line. With Tanzu Mission Control, enterprises will gain visibility and control over all their Kubernetes clusters, including vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions, do-it-yourself Kubernetes and anywhere else they might reside. Tanzu Mission Control capabilities include:
- Administrator visibility of all Kubernetes clusters, which will provide administrators with observability of all Kubernetes clusters, including assessment of cluster and component health.
- Operator control of policy, which will make it simple for operators to apply policies for access, back-up, security and more to individual clusters or to fleets of clusters that span environments.
- Developer independence, which will allow developers to access resources via workspaces through self-service methods, powered by Kubernetes APIs.
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