Today, I wanted to revisit VMware Tanzu as well as cover the announcment of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4 that happened with the recent announcements and releases of VMware vSphere 7 and other products. Many great new features and solutions moving forward from VMware as they continue to move forward with their app modernization portfolio of products. Let’s look at VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 announced features.
VMware Tanzu – What is It and What Solutions Does it Include?
We covered VMware Tanzu some time ago, however, let’s revisit what VMware Tanzu is with the official announcement from VMware of the GA release of this overall portfolio of products. To begin with, VMware Tanzu is not any one product, it is a solution of products, much like vRealize.
Overall, it is a suite of products and services that will help enterprises deliver higher quality software much faster. The Tanzu suite of products can be used to do the following:
- Automate the app lifecycle
- Run Kubernetes across multiple clouds
- Unify and optimize multi-cloud operations
The initial suite of products from VMware that make up the VMware Tanzu portfolio today includes the following:
- VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
- VMware Tanzu Mission Control
- VMware Tanzu Application Catalog
VMware Tanzu also incorporates technologies and products from Pivotal Application Service (PAS). Other changes to note are VMware has renamed Wavefront by VMware to Tanzu Observability by Wavefront and NSX Service Mesh is now Tanzu Service Mesh which is built on top of NSX.
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
Running Kubernetes correctly can be difficult, across a wide range of platforms and environments.
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a Kubernetes runtime that helps customers install and run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment and choose the infrastructure they are going to run it on.
Environments include data centers, hyperscalers, service providers, and also in edge environments. The VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid solution contains open source technologies needed provision and support a vendor-neutral Kubernetes environment.
VMware Tanzu Mission Control
This was another service that VMware previewed at VMworld in 2019. It provides a centralized management platform for operating and securing Kubernetes across teams and clouds.
Advantages include centralized management, security, and governance. Developers can access environment in a self-service way that allows getting code into production environments much more quickly and efficiently.
VMware Tanzu Application Catalog
This is a new offering from VMware that provides a customizable catalog sourced from Bitnami that helps to validate the integrity of open source software as secured, tested, and maintained for production environments. This is the “Project Galleon” from 2019 which is now available as Tanzu Application Catalog.
VMware Cloud Foundation 4
VMware Cloud Foundation 4 helps to deliver the whole cloud methodology to on-premises environments. VMware VCF 4 helps to allow businesses to benefit from simplified management of containers and VM workloads across various clouds.
VMware Cloud Foundation 4 is the next evolution forward for VMware Cloud Foundation, incorporating the newest hybrid cloud infrastructure available, built on top of vSphere 7.
VCF 4 will provide consistent management and provisioning for both virtual machines and containerized workloads and also deliver intrinsic security and lifecycle management across the software-defined data center.
Again this helps to bring both developers and IT operations together. Developers can deliver and update apps quickly and efficiently and IT ops are able to deliver the supporting infrastructure in a nimble fashion with both control and security.
What components are included in VMware Cloud Foundation 4? VCF 4 will include the following solutions and services:
- vSphere 7 – Check out my post here about vSphere 7. As a quick overview, vSphere 7 has been totally redesigned and rearchitected using Kubernetes. VMware has mentioned that vSphere 7 will initially be available only through VMware Cloud Foundation 4.
- vSAN 7 – The vSAN 7 HCI solution is the premiere software-defined solution. VMware has introduced some exciting new features in vSAN 7 including simplified lifecycle support, native file services, and enhanced cloud storage to name a few
- vRealize 8.1 – vRealize Operations 8.1 continues to extend the self-driving operations of modern infrastructure for virtualized workloads (both VMs and containers).
- NSX-T – Software-defined networking is delivered in VCF 4 by VMware’s maturing NSX-T platform. NSX-T is the SDN solution moving forward with VMware.
VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu
An extension of VMware Cloud Foundation 4 is VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu. This includes the VMware Cloud Foundation Services which is an integrated Kubernetes and RESTful API surface to allow driving API access to core services.
VCF 4 with Tanzu includes:
- Tanzu Runtime Services – Delivers core Kubernetes development services including Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
- Hybrid Infrastructure Services – This feature is driven by VMware vSphere 7, enabling full Kubernetes API access as well as infrastructure-as-code APIs that can be interacted with vRealize Automation.
Wrapping Up
VMVMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 Announced Features showcase the multi-cloud vision that VMware is bringing to reality with the combination of containers and virtual machines in the already familiar platform offered by vSphere.
VMware Tanzu provides three new great services along with VCF 4 which is built on top of vSphere 7, the next generation of VMware vSphere. Interestingly as well, VMware Cloud Foundation may very well become the means to get all other VMware services at some point. As mentioned, VMware has noted that VCF 4 will be “at first” the only way to get vSphere 7.
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