VMware Cloud Tanzu Services: A Technical Introduction

With a multitude of customers using the vSphere platform in a cloud environment, VMware Cloud on AWS has a proven track record of managing virtual machines on AWS's global infrastructure. And at this year's VMworld, VMware is building on that success by adding management capabilities for container-based workloads.

At VMworld, VMware is introducing VMware Cloud with Tanzu services . Tanzu services enable customers to deploy Kubernetes clusters with the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service, as well as manage Kubernetes clusters across clouds with Tanzu Mission Control Essentials.

VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

VMware Cloud on AWS introduces Tanzu services as an easy path to enterprise-grade Kubernetes on a fully managed, hybrid-cloud ready Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for all enterprise applications. Tanzu services include the following capabilities:

• Managed Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service: ision Tanzu Kubernetes clusters within a few minutes using a simple, fast, and self-service experience in the VMware Cloud console. The underlying SDDC infrastructure and capacity required for Kubernetes workloads is fully managed by VMware. Use vCenter Server for managing Kubernetes workloads by deploying Kubernetes clusters, provisioning role-based access and allocating capacity for Developer teams. Manage multiple TKG clusters as namespaces with observability, troubleshooting and resiliency in vCenter Server.

• Built in support for Tanzu Mission Control Essentials: Attach upstream compliant Kubernetes clusters including Amazon EKS and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters. Manage lifecycle for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters and centralize platform operations for Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes management plane offered by Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control provides a global visibility across clusters and clouds and increases security and governance by automating operational tasks such as access and security management at scale.

Tanzu services on the VMware Cloud on AWS platform brings together the three personas working on modern applications. vSphere Administrators manage virtual machines on-premises and in the cloud and allocate resources for platform operators to deploy workloads. The operators use Tanzu Mission Control to manage and maintain clusters across environments. Developers can create code using a flexible platform for container and virtual machine-based workloads.

Now let's dig deeper into each of these components of Tanzu services.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

Last year, VMware introduced its new Kubernetes platform called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). TKG was built on top of the open source community driven project named Cluster API to provide Kubernetes style APIs to automate lifecycle management for platform operators. With Tanzu services support for VMware Cloud on AWS, TKG is now offered as a part of the VMware Cloud on AWS Host pricing and customers do not have to pay extra for that

vSphere administrators can easily enable the service by submitting network CIDRs in a web-based form. These CIDR addresses are used by NSX-T to setup new networks and routes to the Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters. Once you've entered the CIDR address ranges, you can activate the supervisor cluster through the menu.

Once activation is complete, a Supervisor cluster will be deployed to your VMware Cloud on AWS instance. This specialized Kubernetes cluster has the ClusterAPI components deployed within it, and can be used to provision your Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters, where your workloads will run.

vSphere Administrators will then create namespaces to isolate resources, and grant ownership access to them. The vSphere Admin will assign resources such as CPU, memory, and disk to the namespace before assigning permissions to users. Any users assigned to this namespace can then create Kubernetes clusters up until they reach the resource limits set by their vSphere Admins.

TKG clusters can then be deployed into your SDDC and can utilize the NSX-T container plugin (NCP) to create load balancers in order to access the applications deployed to the clusters. They can also take advantage of vSAN storage for persistent volumes by using Cloud Native Storage (CNS).

Tanzu Mission Control Essentials

Tanzu Mission Control Essentials is a second component included in Tanzu services. Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is a software as a service (SaaS) solution that acts as a global management plane for Kubernetes clusters. Tanzu Mission Control brings global visibility, scalable operations, and consistent policy management to your modern apps by centralizing Kubernetes across teams and clouds.

Platform Operators can use Tanzu Mission Control to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters from the TMC user interface, API, or command line interface. Once deployed, clusters can be scaled, upgraded, and configured through the same interfaces.

Clusters managed by Tanzu Mission Control can have policy applied and enforced to make cluster configuration simple. Operators can have access and security policies applied to a cluster or groups of clusters for uniformed configuration across the fleet. This capability is available for more than just Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. Any conformant Kubernetes cluster can be attached to TMC for policy management. This includes managed services such as Amazon EKS or Azure AKS clusters.

Next steps:

Please check out the VMworld session to learn more:

For further questions, please get in touch with your VMware or AWS representative to learn more about this.

If you would like to learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some resources for you:

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