With our recent release, several of our blogs have introduced you to our capability to manage VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters with the vRealize Cloud Management solution, on-premises or in the cloud. As Kubernetes becomes mainstream in enterprises it is essential to operationalize it with a cloud management platform, and with vRealize Cloud Management you get the ability to provision and operate workloads with policy and governance. In this blog I will summarize our capability with TKG clusters from deployment to monitoring to network security to log analysis so you can support and serve the consumers of your SDDC who are using Kubernetes.
Customers are excited about vSphere 7 because it provides a VMware supported implementation of Kubernetes, integrated directly with the platform they already know and trust to run business application workloads. Additionally, it allows developers to interact with the platform using the same tools and DevOps principles they use today. It really is the best of both worlds.
But, layer on vRealize Cloud Management, and it is a whole new game. Expand visibility to improve performance, understand capacity and manage costs, ensure compliance and security, and enable self-service for Kubernetes workloads.
Deploying TKG Clusters
In fact, you can easily deploy TKG clusters as a service through vRealize Automation or vRealize Automation Cloud, as Sam McGeown explains in this blog post. vRealize Automation not only allows you to automate the deployment of TKG clusters but also manage and deploy Kubernetes resources within those clusters. For example, you can manage namespaces and provide RBAC controls for accessing those namespaces to specific project teams. The documentation for vRealize Automation 8.1 provides Blueprint examples. There are also event topics provided for Kubernetes cluster tasks to allow for extensibility via Event Broker Subscriptions. Last but not least, the Code Stream service within vRealize Automation provides application and infrastructure pipelining capabilities to realize the full control over your Kubernetes environments.
Understand Capacity and Manage Costs
Of course, deploying TKG clusters is only half of the story. Having operational visibility into the infrastructure supporting the TKG clusters is critical and it is possible using vRealize Operations or vRealize Operations Cloud just as Sunny Dua explains in this blog post. Without this visibility, it is practically impossible to troubleshoot issues in the SDDC that could be impacting your Kubernetes environment. Capacity planning also needs to be aware of the demands of your Kubernetes environment, and vRealize Operations on-prem and SaaS can help here as well by intelligently analyzing your usage and demand for effective capacity planning, cost visibility and proactive optimization of your SDDC.
Log Analysis
While you are troubleshooting, having log data is critically important to get the full picture of what has transpired. Even better is to have vRealize Log Insight or vRealize Log Insight Cloud ingest the logs from the infrastructure as well as the TKG clusters to provide log analytics for fast correlation of all events to narrow the root cause quickly. In this blog, Munishpal Makhija explains how to forward TKG cluster logs to vRealize Log Insight.
By the way, Sajal Debnath has written a technical white paper titled the “Guidebook for Monitoring VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Environment” which goes into detail about using vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Network Insight to operationalize TKG cluster in your SDDC. You can download a copy here.
There you have it, a complete story for operationalizing TKG clusters in your SDDC with the vRealize Cloud Management solution. Accelerate cloud evolution by supporting applications with TKG, provide cloud scale and cloud experience for your developers for better productivity, and get fast time to value for Kubernetes implementations in your private cloud.
Want More Information?
To learn more about how vRealize Cloud Management helps customers manage modern application platforms for infrastructure automation, consistent operations and governance based on DevOps principles and AI, visit the vRealize Suite web page. Also be sure to visit the Hands-on Lab to learn more technical details and experience vRealize Cloud Management yourself.
