Table of Contents
- Why Kubernetes and containers are essential for application modernization
- What is VMware Tanzu?
- VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)
- Final Notes
Microservices and containerized workloads are driving an app modernization revolution among organizations today looking to refactor traditional applications and other services for modern environments. Containerized microservices provide advantages over conventional monolithic applications in one or two virtual machines. In addition, it allows organizations to move to a more DevOps approach for rolling out applications. Kubernetes is by far the most widely adopting container orchestration platform today. However, there are many challenges for organizations looking to adopt Kubernetes.
At VMworld 2019, VMware unveiled VMware Tanzu to help organizations solve the new challenges of Kubernetes environments. What is VMware Tanzu, and what developments have been seen since its announcement in 2019?
Why Kubernetes and containers are essential for application modernization
We have seen many revolutions over the past few years. First, with the virtualization revolution, businesses worldwide went through server consolidation to bring physical servers into virtual machines running on modern hardware. Since then, we have seen the cloud revolution accelerating. As a result, organizations are now looking at refactoring applications to run in containers.
Conventional monolithic applications run large chunks of the application architecture on single or multiple virtual machines. Typically, the three-tier web, application, and database layers have been used for the application stack.
The microservices architecture refers to separating large applications into smaller pieces allowing the individual application components to be updated/changed/deployed/developed independently to the rest of the application. Containerized infrastructure is ideal for this modern approach as containers allow focusing on the application without worrying about dependencies.
Kubernetes provides an open-source platform for managing containerized workloads as containers in themselves cannot be highly available and resilient. Much like virtual machines in a traditional virtualized environment, containers need to have an orchestration layer to reprovision them if a container host fails. Kubernetes provides this orchestration layer to manage the containerized environment.
Additionally, when load demands increase, Kubernetes can also scale containers as needed to meet the demand for the application, allowing organizations to have the “cloud-like” functionality managing their infrastructure. However, Kubernetes has been notoriously challenging to provision, configure, and manage from scratch.
With VMware Tanzu, VMware has included the ability to have native Kubernetes inside the VMware ESXi hypervisor. As a result, it can be a game-changer for organizations looking to deploy Kubernetes in their environments.
What is VMware Tanzu?
VMware Tanzu was announced at VMworld 2019. VMware Tanzu is a suite of products that allow organizations to run Kubernetes in a supported way across cloud and on-premises environments. In addition, with VMware vSphere 7.0, organizations can run Tanzu-powered containers directly inside their VMware vSphere environments (formerly called Project Pacific). This new capability provided in VMware vSphere is powerful in that it removes many barriers to entry for even smaller SMBs who desire to run Kubernetes in their environments.
VI admins who have been used to installing, configuring, and managing traditional virtual machines for years in the vSphere Client, can now use the same tooling and operational workflows to manage their Kubernetes environments with VMware Tanzu. The new vSphere with Tanzu essentially opens up the ability to have a supported, built-in, native Kubernetes container orchestration inside vSphere.
The vSphere with Tanzu architecture includes two types of Kubernetes clusters:
- Supervisor cluster – The supervisor cluster Uses the VMware ESXi host itself as a worker node using what is known as a Spherelet (VMware’s equivalent to a kubelet). It is not run in a virtual machine but inside the ESXi hypervisor itself
- Guest cluster – The guest cluster runs general-purpose Kubernetes workloads. The guest clusters run inside specialized VMs on the supervisor cluster. These run a fully compliant Kubernetes distribution, compatible with current Kubernetes applications and tooling
The new vSphere with Tanzu opens up the floodgates for Kubernetes in existing vSphere environments as vSphere powers over 70+ million VMs worldwide. Again, it provides a quick path to running Kubernetes as VI admins do not have to learn new tools and basic skills working with vSphere as these all apply by default with vSphere with Tanzu.
However, it is essential to understand that VMware Tanzu transcends vSphere with Tanzu to include a wide range of Tanzu products in the portfolio, including:
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
- Tanzu Mission Control
- Tanzu Application Service
- Tanzu Build Service
- Tanzu Application Catalog
- Tanzu Service Mesh
- Tanzu Data Services
- Tanzu Observability
VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)
A new development in VMware Tanzu has been the release of VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). The new VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) release of VMware Tanzu provides a free edition of VMware Tanzu that allows working with the same distribution of VMware Tanzu available in the commercial package. VMware Tanzu Community Edition is free to download and doesn’t require users to sign up.
Other benefits of Tanzu Community Edition include being community-supported, and it doesn’t have a time limitation like a freemium trial. In addition, it provides many options for deployment, including local environments such as a local development workstation. However, it also works with enterprise hypervisors and public cloud environments of choice.
Below, we can see the multiple options available for deploying Tanzu Community Edition, including:
- Docker
- VMware vSphere
- Amazon EC2
- Microsoft Azure
With the Tanzu Community Edition 0.10 release, VMware has added the new unmanaged cluster type that cuts the deployment time of the Tanzu Community Edition deployment in half or more. The unmanaged cluster will take the place of the standalone cluster type that was found in previous releases of TCE. While the standalone cluster type is still included in 0.10, it is deprecated and will be removed from future releases.
The unmanaged cluster helps to satisfy the following use cases:
- Limited resources available
- You only need to provision one cluster at a time
- You need a local development environment
- Clusters are frequently provisioned and destroyed
With Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) clusters, developers and DevOps professionals have a solution that may replace other local Kubernetes development environments, including Minikube, Docker Desktop Kubernetes, and other solutions. It is an appealing solution for VMware vSphere environments where VMware Tanzu may be used in production as it allows developers to access and develop with the same Tanzu Kubernetes environment for local development running in production.
Final Notes
Kubernetes adoption and use in enterprise data centers and cloud environments will continue to grow. As businesses formulate their plans to refactor applications and transition from monolithic apps using the conventional three-tier architecture to a microservices layout, Kubernetes container orchestration provides an essential piece to the puzzle allowing businesses to transition to modern infrastructure easily.
Many organizations today are using VMware vSphere in the enterprise data center. With VMware Tanzu, and specifically VMware vSphere with Tanzu, businesses can transition to using Kubernetes without retooling or changing management workflows as vSphere with Tanzu makes everything possible inside the vSphere Client. The recent addition of VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) helps to strengthen the appeal of VMware Tanzu, allowing developers to develop locally and get familiar with the same Tanzu solution found in the commercial Tanzu offerings.
Related Posts
VMware Tanzu Editions
VMware Tanzu Community Edition – Cluster API
Tanzu Community Edition – Unmanaged Clusters
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