Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management in VMware Cloud Foundation

VCF Now Includes Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management 

Kubernetes (K8s) is integral to modern application deployment strategies. A key tenet of this is being able to scale your operations and policies around K8s without increasing the burden on your operators. We’re excited to announce that as part of our unified private cloud strategy, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) now includes K8s multi-cluster management capabilities.

Starting in May 2025, all customers with an active VCF subscription are entitled to Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed (TMC-SM), at no additional cost. Effective immediately, if you have an active VCF subscription you can start using TMC-SM to manage your K8s fleets running in VCF 5.x/vSphere 8.x environments. 

Why You Need Multi-Cluster Management

Since the advent of containerization over a decade ago, organizations have been reaping business benefits from modernizing their application packaging and delivery processes. Transforming application development practices has helped companies across all industries become more profitable. K8s has been at the forefront of this revolution, emerging as the de facto platform for container orchestration and modern application delivery.  

However, with adoption of containers and Kubernetes comes a substantial jump in complexity. Platform teams are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in the cloud-native ecosystem. Over half of the respondents to Broadcom’s 2023 State of Kubernetes report communicated that a lack of expertise in Kubernetes is a top concern. This risk becomes heightened as cloud native adoption increases, and the teams that support these environments are asked to do more with less. 

VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) is an upstream-conformant, enterprise-ready distribution included with VCF. Up to this point, it’s been simple to deploy and lifecycle manage VKS clusters from VCF. But K8s management is more nuanced than deploying, upgrading, and patching clusters. And as cluster fleets grow, complexity increases exponentially. VCF is invested in native K8s management, to empower platform teams to optimize operations of their diverse cloud native environments with better control, efficiency, and security. 

Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed 1.4.2 is Generally Available 

With its unique resource hierarchy and data model, TMC-SM delivers increased control, efficiency and security to simplify K8s operations as your cluster fleets grow. TMC-SM ships with powerful capabilities to help platform engineers automate and enforce guardrails on their cloud-native environments. These capabilities include:

• Granular RBAC
• Policy Management
• Cluster Lifecycle Management
• Data Protection
• Package Management
• Continuous Delivery 
• Cluster Inspections

We’re excited to share that TMC Self-Managed (TMC-SM) 1.4.2 is now generally available. In 1.4.2, we have made significant user-experience improvements including a new UI-based deployment process. This greatly simplifies the installation, enabling teams to get started with multi-cluster management quickly. 

Across Broadcom, we’re committed to adding support for new K8s versions, usually within two months of the upstream releases. With TMC-SM, we’ve added lifecycle management (LCM) support for VKS 3.4 and K8s minor version 1.33. 

Here is a quick summary of the other features:

• Support for VCF 5.2.x
• Rebranding from Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGs) to vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) in the TMC UI and documentation
• LCM support for TKGm 2.5.3, 2.5.4 clusters
• Support for K8s 1.33 minor versions, including LCM of VKS and TKGm, plus attach for any CNCF-conformant cluster running these versions

Changes in TMC-SaaS and Transition to Self-Managed

As part of the VCF strategy and our focus on private cloud and packaged software offerings, we announced the End-of-Life (EoL) of TMC’s SaaS based offering effective November 15, 2025. As such, we are asking TMC-SaaS customers to transition to TMC Self-Managed. We are committed to help customers with the transition and recommend reaching out to your channel partner or Broadcom account executive for assistance. If you want to get started right away or migrate yourself – you can find the public migration guide and runbook here.

Get Started!

To get started with TMC-SM 1.4.2 please download via the Broadcom Support Portal and refer to the public documentation. 

Looking Ahead

Providing TMC-SM to VCF customers is only the first step in empowering platform teams with multi-cluster management capabilities. Over time, we expect these capabilities will become tightly integrated with VCF Automation, providing a streamlined implementation and consumption experience with improved visibility, security, and resilience across the VKS fleet.